


Someone New

by Merelle



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angel holds the braincell in this household, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Good Dad Jack, Hurt/Comfort, Jack being Jack, M/M, Murder Husbands but in space, Nobody in this is smart, Pandora - Freeform, Rhys (Borderlands) is a Little Shit, Siren Rhys (Borderlands), Slow Burn, gratuitous use of swear words, guys being dudes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:34:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 28,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24161410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merelle/pseuds/Merelle
Summary: Rhys wishes, just for once, he could be out of the spotlight.Three years after escaping Helios and living it up on Pandora, Rhys' relatively stable life is cut short when an accident leaves him half-dead in a Hyperion base. This would be bad enough, if he weren't also the first documented male siren and the Crimson Raiders' secret weapon against Handsome Jack and his army. Captured by the enemy and stranded in the one place he swore he'd never return, Rhys is sure he, and in turn, the Resistance, is done for.But then again, when did anything in his life ever end the way he assumed it would?-----------Or: an alternate universe in which Rhys is a siren in the Raiders, Jack is a decent father, Angel is her dad's little badass, and things never go according to plan.
Relationships: Handsome Jack/Rhys (Borderlands)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 175





	1. The Art of Scraping Through

**Author's Note:**

> The first chapter of this fic has been in my drafts for LITERAL MONTHS and somehow I never posted it?? 
> 
> Anyways, I'm finally getting it up and am super excited to share it!!! Enjoy :)

Time moves slower when you’re running out of it. Rhys learned this way back in Secondary, and he’s reminded of it now, sprinting through the near-silent hallways of Residential Sector 7B. Helios is never quiet, not really, because nobody ever sleeps, but every twelve hours or so the lights dim and anyone not required to be out retires to their quarters. It isn’t uncommon for Rhys to be out this late. The stars always seem brighter when Helios shuts its power down, and on the nights he couldn’t sleep Rhys would take his ECHO and curl up by the windows to watch the ever expanding grandeur of the universe without the distraction of Hyperion’s hive mind workers bustling about. As what remains of his shirt sleeve whips against rapidly cooling skin, Rhys finds himself wishing he could have those nights back.

A bitter, metallic taste is starting to burn Rhys' tongue, hot and thick and predictably awful. He chokes it down, sucking in whatever air he can muster as his throbbing feet carry him the rest of the way to his apartment. Vaughn must be asleep by now - he has to be, given his new work schedule and the fact his wake up time is five in the morning, somehow. Rhys just hopes his roommate went to bed in his own room, behind a soundproof door, and not on the couch as per a recent habit. As much as Rhys wants to say goodbye, Vaughn would probably only complicate the matter. A note will have to do. It’s ー it’ll be fine. Yeah. Vaughn will understand, won’t he? He’s got to. Of all people, Vaughn will understand why Rhys did what he did. 

Rhys skids to a halt at their door, the flickering yellow _2413_ cheerfully blinking back at him as he desperately slams a sweaty hand against the glass keypad. _WELCOME HOME, RHYS,_ flashes across the display, searing itself into Rhys' retinas in that godawful shade of yellow. _Home,_ he thinks bitterly, his first coherent thought he’s had in the time it took him to run halfway across the station. _That’s going to be real ironic in about ten minutes._

Silence greets him as the heavy door slides shut with a hiss that is much too loud for his liking. A wave of relief washes over Rhys at the utter lack of noise, because it means that Vaughn isn’t snoring on the couch. Sure enough, Vaughn’s bedroom door is locked tight. Rhys sends a silent thank you to whatever higher power can hear him - this is the first thing that has gone right all day. He doesn’t want to think about how his best friend would have reacted, seeing Rhys stumble in with blood on his hands and half his shirt, mangled and singed, fluttering against the fading light of blue tattoos. Vaughn...he trusts Vaughn more than anyone, but this is Helios. This is _Hyperion._ One wrong word and suddenly every person and their mother knows your dirty little secret. It happened just last month, to what’s-his-face down in HR. That scandal, while large, pales in comparison to what Rhys is hiding. 

You can’t be a siren without someone finding out eventually.

There isn’t a sensical pattern to what Rhys shoves into his duffel. (The bright yellow one, with an _H_ branded so large across each side it’s actually rather unfortunate.) He tugs shirts from their hangars in his closet, balls them up together, and shoves them into his bag with reckless abandon. If he ends up taking thirteen shirts and only two pairs of pants, well, then that’s a problem for future Rhys. Clothes, an ECHOtablet, his sketchpad and a pencil case all find their way into Rhys' duffel, where they’ll all be tossed around into a great big tangle that will, in the future, be a massive pain in the ass to separate. His heart gives a little pang as he flicks off the lights for the last time, taking a last glance at the posters plastered over his walls. Hopes and dreams of someone who never had a chance. There’s the poster from way back in college, the one depicting Handsome Jack staring down a vault monster. It’s worn around the edges and a round coffee stain has discoloured a corner, a reminder of many late nights spent chugging enough energy drink/coffee concoctions to put a wyvern into a coma. The sight of Jack’s perfectly coiffed hair and mismatched eyes, two things that used to make Rhys' heart do a little tap dance, burn at him from the inside out. It’s like someone has pulled a switch deep within him and the cheery block letters become taunts and Rhys recoils, hatred blooming in his belly like an ugly flower. Handsome Jack is no longer the perfect man, the man Rhys wants to be. He is a symbol of everything Rhys cannot have, and everything he must leave behind.

The door shuts with a jarring finality. 

Rhys should feel bad. He should feel _guilty,_ or something _. Anything._ He doesn’t, as he extracts the briefcase from its secret safe. He doesn’t, as he loads his pistol and slips it into its holster. The only thing he feels is a haunting numbness eating away at his bones, and the faint fogginess in his skull, foreshadowing what’s to come. 

The blue spirals adorning his left arm tingle under Rhys' new shirt, illuminating the darkness while also itching something dreadful. Rhys scowls. It’s honestly a miracle he made it on Helios as long as he did, when he’s walking around glowing like a nightlight, even with the blocks of blue ink he’d gotten tattooed over the siren markings. He tugs a heavy jacket on in a vain attempt to smother the irritating lights. It works, somewhat. Muffles them. His hand is still glowing, but that’s easily fixed by shoving it into the stiff pockets of the ruddy red jacket. Said jacket is out of place in an apartment stuffed full of Hyperion-branded everything and Rhys isn’t entirely sure where he got it from, but man, is he thankful for it now. It fits snug and warm over the leeching chill that always follows any use of his powers. After such a long dry spell, Rhys had forgotten how awful he felt post-Phasebreak. He always compared it to the onset of a bad case of the flu - that sort of achy, throbbing feeling and a nasty slime coating his tongue, accompanied by shivering and sweating no matter how hot or cold he really is. 

Rhys rips a page from the closest notebook and hunches over the counter, gnawing on the end of his pen as he thinks of what to write. His hands are shaking as he presses the pen to the paper. He’s not sure if it’s from nerves or the current horrible state he’s in. Probably both.

_Vaughn,_ he starts off. Nice and simple. 

_You’re probably wondering what the hell is going on. The truth is-_ Rhys pauses, sucking on the pen as he thinks of what to write next. - _I lied to you._ No, Rhys thinks, and scratches it out hard enough to tear a hole in the paper. _There’s something I never told you,_ he writes instead. Better. _I won’t write it down so just take my word that it’s life or death. I’ve done something, Vaughn, that can’t be undone. I can’t stay here. I’m leaving, and probably won’t see you again. Wish things could’ve been different. I’ll really miss you. You were the best bro I could’ve ever had. I’m sorry it had to end like this. Do me a favour, though - don’t tell anyone I left. Not even Yvette. Pretend I just disappeared. It’s the best option, trust me. Hard as it may be, forget I ever existed, okay?_

_I’m sorry._

_Please burn this note once you read it. It’s for the best._

_Your Bro,_

_\- Rhys_

The words come surprisingly easy, but it’s still not enough. There’s so much left unsaid. If he had more time, then maybe- _damnit,_ why did this have to happen? _Damn_ Vasquez and _damn_ Hyperion. Everything is going to shit and there isn’t anything Rhys can do except run. He leaves the note on the counter and picks up the briefcase again. It had been meant for both of them, in case something happened that forced them to run, and it feels wrong taking it like this. Like he’s breaking an unspoken promise. As much as he hates to admit it, there isn’t much he can do now - he’ll have time to agonize over everything once Helios is a speck on the horizon. Rhys slings his duffel over his back and pulls his hood up to hide his face from any cameras, silently wishing he had enough time to find a scarf or bandana or something that didn’t have _Hyperion_ splashed across it. Too late now, he thinks begrudgingly. Guess he’s looking at the floor all the way down to the escape pod docks. With a soft, almost mournful sigh, he sets his Hyperion ID on the kitchen counter with a gentle _click._ His twenty-two-year-old face stares back at him, frozen with that god awful sneer plastered across his features. He looks so naive it’s almost funny - almost. Stupid kid had no idea what was coming. 

Rhys is halfway out the door when the lights turn on. 

For a split second, Rhys is ready to blast someone full-force, until he realizes the light is coming from inside the apartment and there isn’t, in fact, a waiting troop of soldiers ready to shoot him in the face. _Shit,_ he curses, turning around painfully slowly. He feels like a kid caught sneaking out of his parent’s house on a school night. It’s not a good feeling. 

“What the hell, Rhys.” 

Playing off the “naughty teen” metaphor, Vaughn sounds just like a disappointed mother. Mother, not father, because there isn’t any malice in his voice and if he’d been anything like Rhys' dad, there would be a _lot_ of it. “Heyyy, Vaughn,” Rhys says weakly. Vaughn is - dressed? Yep, he’s fully clothed, neat slacks replaced with cargo pants and a hefty-looking green jacket drawn tight over his torso. He’s got a beige backpack slung over a shoulder and a pistol - matching Rhys' - dangling from his fingers. Rhys opens his mouth and completely forgets how to speak. “I got a notification saying the safe had been opened,” Vaughn informs him, completely nonchalant. “The emergency safe. For emergencies. Like having to leave suddenly in the middle of the night, without warning.” He shifts his weight so his bag is centered. “Where we off to?”

Despite it all, Rhys fails to hold in a smile. He should’ve guessed Vaughn would find out, closed door or no. Somehow, it makes this whole situation better. 

“Pandora,” Rhys tells him. “And then...well, somewhere else.”

Vaughn’s ID joins Rhys' on the counter. “Alright. Cool. Let’s get moving.”

When the door closes, neither of them look back.

***

“You didn’t have to come, you know.”

Vaughn raises an eyebrow barely visible under his hood. “Uh, yeah, Rhys, I did. We’re bros. Where you go, I go. No questions asked.”

“...still.”

Vaughn knocks their shoulders together. “Hey, we got through _intern training_ together. I think we can get through this.”

“It’s going to be dangerous,” Rhys presses. 

“I’m counting on it,” Vaughn replies, waggling his pistol. “But it’ll be fine. We’ve got you.”

“Dude, I’m even worse with a gun then you are,” Rhys snorts. It’s true - without the ECHOeye, his aim is worse than a blind man’s after a night of heavy drinking. Not to mention he’s still suffering the after effects of his Phasebreak. He motions his hand and they both dash across an empty hallway, colliding with one another on the other side as Rhys fails to stop in time, stumbling over his feet while the ground sways beneath him.

“Who said you needed a gun,” Vaughn hisses. Their footsteps echo off the polished floors. Somewhere nearby, a cleaning bot huffs after them, chirping in its language of binary and admonished beeps. “Just siren-blast them or something.”

Rhys freezes mid-step. “What,” he chokes out. Vaughn, apparently completely unbothered, continues on his merry way. “How’d you-? How could you possibly-”  
“Your arm glows, dude,” Vaughn tosses over his shoulder. “This one time, you fell asleep on the sofa and set your shirt on fire. I had to put it out with my soda.” He frowns momentarily, like he’s remembering the poor can of soda that had been sacrificed to Rhys' arm. “I figured it out ages ago but I figured it wasn’t something you wanted to talk about.”

One of these days, Rhys reckons with a slow smile, people are going to stop underestimating Vaughn. He’s a lot smarter than he gets credit for, which is either a very good thing, or a very bad thing. Right now, Rhys can’t figure out which it is. He reasons it’s good, then, that Vaughn is coming with him. He’d be the first to be questioned about Rhys, and it’d be one thing to be completely unaware of Rhys' heritage, but if he _knew_ and _lied..._ Rhys can’t even think about it. “Well,” he says, throat hoarse, “Thanks for keeping it secret.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it. That’s what best friends do.”

It takes all of four minutes to bypass the escape pod’s security system. Rhys isn’t sure whether to be thankful or supremely disappointed in Hyperion’s tech. The loyal middle manager part of him is leaning more towards the latter. For a company so prideful of itself and its technology, one would think the security would be good enough that any old code monkey couldn’t hack right into it. (Granted, Rhys _is_ quite good, but still. Get your shit together, Hyperion.) 

Vaughn, keeping watch, is uncharacteristically quiet, gun in hand as he paces back and forth. There’s a solemn silence between them both, a vigil for the life they’re leaving behind. Since college, all either of them ever wanted was to work at Hyperion. Rhys still remembers when that acceptance letter came in the mail - how ecstatic Vaughn was, how excited _he_ was, knowing that they were to be shipped to Helios. Rhys feels a little guilty toward his past self, throwing life long dreams away in the blink of an eye. _You did kill someone,_ his conscience reminds him, which makes him feel a little better. About leaving, not killing someone. Remembering he killed someone does _not_ make him feel better. (Contrary to what most outsiders would think about Hyperion personnel.)

“Ready?” 

Vaughn’s voice jerks Rhys back to the present. He’s already clambered inside the tiny escape pod, backpack crammed between his legs. “I…” Rhys takes one last look back, at darkened halls and portraits of his long time idol. Part of him wants to give up here. Lie his way out of the whole situation. People kill each other on Helios all the time - why should this be any different? 

The tattoos hidden under Rhys’ jacket start to itch again, reminding him just how different it is. “...Yeah,” he finally answers. “I’m ready.” Rhys steps inside the escape pod, wrinkling his nose as he catches a whiff of stale air. It’s a lot colder in the pod than it is in the rest of the station. A lot colder, and a lot more cramped. Rhys has to splay his legs out awkwardly around Vaughn’s chair just to get both of them to fit without their knees knocking together. His bag he stuffs beside him, and then proceeds to ponder how the hell he’s going to get it out once they land. The sliding door hisses shut once Rhys secures his seatbelt. “ _Welcome aboard,_ ” purrs the robotic voice of the system. “ _Please choose a destination._ ” 

Vaughn and Rhys exchange glances as a list of names pop up on the navigation screen. 

  * _The Highlands_


  * The Dust


  * Three Horns Divide/Valley


  * Arid Badlands


  * Eridium Pumping Stations (Blight Region)


  * Eridium Pumping Stations (Badlands Region)



Rhys decides the one depicted with civilization is their best bet. 

This would ultimately be their first mistake. 

The escape pod shudders and groans as the docking gear detaches itself from its slot in Helios’ lower deck. Rhys swallows, all the nerves he’d been suppressing rising into his mouth, tasting strongly of bile. _No going back now._

“I think I’m gonna be sick,” he announces. Vaughn wrinkles his nose, leaning as far away from Rhys as is allowed in the tight confines. 

“Not on me, you’re not.”

Rhys groans, letting his head hit the wall behind him. His stomach is doing backflips. “This was a bad idea.”

Any response from Vaughn is lost in an overwhelming _boom_ as the escape pod’s rockets ignite. The whole little pod shakes, bouncing its occupants from side to side. Rhys feels the skin of his palm break where his nails were pressing in and chews on his lip to distract himself from the sting of the cuts as blood seeps hot and sticky through his fingers. In the blink of an eye, they’re flung into the great abyss of space, watching the giant _H_ in the sky grow further and further away as they plummet towards the planet below. 

***

_𝙾𝙿𝙴𝙽𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙻𝙸𝙽𝙴 𝙾𝙵 𝚃𝚁𝙰𝙽𝚂𝙼𝙸𝚂𝚂𝙸𝙾𝙽…_

  
_𝙲𝙾𝙽𝙽𝙴𝙲𝚃𝙸𝙽𝙶…_

  
_𝙲𝙾𝙽𝙽𝙴𝙲𝚃𝙴𝙳. 𝙷𝙴𝙻𝙻𝙾, 𝚂𝙴𝚇𝚈._

  
_**𝙷𝙹𝟼𝟿:** 𝚑𝚎𝚢𝚊 𝚙𝚛𝚒𝚗𝚌𝚎𝚜𝚜. 𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚊 𝚐𝚘𝚘𝚍 𝚜𝚕𝚎𝚎𝚙? 𝚌𝚊𝚝𝚌𝚑 𝚜𝚘𝚖𝚎 𝚣𝚜? 𝚠𝚎𝚕𝚕 𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚎𝚗𝚘𝚞𝚐𝚑 𝟸 𝚔𝚒𝚌𝚔 𝚜𝚞𝚖 𝚋𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚒𝚝 𝚊𝚜𝚜𝚎𝚜?_

  
_**𝟼𝚄𝟺𝚁𝙳𝟷𝟺𝙽𝟺𝙽𝟼𝟹𝚕:** 𝙵𝚘𝚛 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚜𝚊𝚔𝚎 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚖𝚒𝚜𝚜𝚒𝚘𝚗, 𝙸 𝚊𝚖 𝚐𝚘𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚘 𝚐𝚕𝚘𝚜𝚜 𝚘𝚟𝚎𝚛 𝚢𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚝𝚛𝚞𝚕𝚢 𝚑𝚘𝚛𝚛𝚒𝚏𝚒𝚌 𝚐𝚛𝚊𝚖𝚖𝚊𝚛. 𝚈𝚎𝚜. 𝙸 𝚊𝚖 𝚠𝚎𝚕𝚕 𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚛𝚎𝚌𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚐𝚎𝚍. 𝙻𝚎𝚝 𝚖𝚎 𝚔𝚗𝚘𝚠 𝚠𝚑𝚎𝚗 𝚝𝚘 𝚋𝚎𝚐𝚒𝚗 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝙸 𝚠𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚝𝚊𝚌𝚝 𝙻𝚒𝚕𝚒𝚝𝚑. _

  
_**𝙷𝙹𝟼𝟿:** 𝚑𝚊𝚑𝚊 𝚟𝚛𝚢 𝚏𝚞𝚗𝚗𝚢 𝚒 𝚝𝚡𝚝 𝚕𝚒𝚔𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚋𝚌 𝚒 𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚎 𝚒𝚖𝚙𝚘𝚛𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚗𝚐𝚜 𝟸 𝚍𝚘. 𝚕𝚒𝚔𝚎 𝚛𝚞𝚗 𝚊 𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚙𝚊𝚗𝚢. 𝚊𝚕𝚜𝚘 𝚒 𝚕𝚒𝚔𝚎 𝚊𝚗𝚗𝚘𝚢𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚞. 𝚊𝚗𝚢𝚠𝚊𝚢𝚜. 𝚜𝚞𝚛𝚟𝚎𝚢 𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎 𝚋𝚋𝚢 𝚐𝚛𝚕, 𝚠𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚛 𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚏𝚊𝚟 𝚋𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚒𝚝𝚜 𝚞𝚙 𝚝𝚘 𝚘𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚏𝚒𝚗𝚎 𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚗𝚒𝚗𝚐 _

  
_**𝟼𝚄𝟺𝚁𝙳𝟷𝟺𝙽𝟺𝙽𝟼𝟹𝚕:** 𝚈𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚠𝚛𝚒𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚒𝚜 𝚐𝚒𝚟𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚖𝚎 𝚋𝚛𝚊𝚒𝚗 𝚍𝚊𝚖𝚊𝚐𝚎. 𝙸 𝚓𝚞𝚜𝚝 𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚌𝚔𝚎𝚍 𝚒𝚗 𝚘𝚗 𝚂𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚝𝚞𝚊𝚛𝚢 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚒𝚝 𝚊𝚙𝚙𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚜 𝚏𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚅𝚊𝚞𝚕𝚝 𝙷𝚞𝚗𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚜 𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚐𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚞𝚙 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚒𝚛 𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚗𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚙𝚊𝚝𝚛𝚘𝚕. 𝙻𝚒𝚕𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚒𝚜 𝚋𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚏𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚖 𝚊𝚜 𝚠𝚎 𝚜𝚙𝚎𝚊𝚔. _

  
_**𝙷𝙹𝟼𝟿: 𝚘𝚔 𝚘𝚔 𝚌𝚘𝚘𝚕**. 𝚠𝚑𝚘𝚜 𝚐𝚘𝚒𝚗𝚐??_

  
_**𝟼𝚄𝟺𝚁𝙳𝟷𝟺𝙽𝟺𝙽𝟼𝟹𝚕:** 𝙽𝚘𝚝 𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚝𝚊𝚛𝚐𝚎𝚝. _

  
_**𝙷𝙹𝟼𝟿:** 𝚘𝚑 𝚠𝚘𝚠 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚗𝚔 𝚞 𝚜𝚘 𝚑𝚎𝚕𝚙𝚏𝚞𝚕. 𝚗𝚟𝚖 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚗. 𝚠𝚊𝚒𝚝 𝚝𝚒𝚕 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚢 𝚛 𝚐𝚘𝚗𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚗 𝚎𝚡𝚎𝚌𝚞𝚝𝚎 𝚙𝚑𝚊𝚜𝚎 𝟷. _

  
_**𝟼𝚄𝟺𝚁𝙳𝟷𝟺𝙽𝟺𝙽𝟼𝟹𝚕:** 𝚈𝚎𝚜, 𝚜𝚒𝚛. 𝚂𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚋𝚢. _

  
_**𝙷𝙹𝟼𝟿:** 𝚐𝚘𝚘𝚍 𝚐𝚒𝚛𝚕. _

  
_**𝙷𝙹𝟼𝟿:** 𝚕𝚎𝚝𝚜 𝚐𝚎𝚝 𝚘𝚞𝚛𝚜𝚎𝚕𝚟𝚎𝚜 𝚊 𝚜𝚒𝚛𝚎𝚗. _

  
**_𝙷𝙹𝟼𝟿 𝙷𝙰𝚂 𝙳𝙸𝚂𝙲𝙾𝙽𝙽𝙴𝙲𝚃𝙴𝙳. 𝙲𝙻𝙾𝚂𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙻𝙸𝙽𝙴 𝙾𝙵 𝚃𝚁𝙰𝙽𝚂𝙼𝙸𝚂𝚂𝙸𝙾𝙽._ **

***

Sunlight has begun to filter in through the windows when Rhys wakes up to his ECHOcomm beeping. It’s a miracle, actually, that he’s woken up after the sun. These days he’s usually awake when the skies are still black, with the intent of getting moving before the heat of day hits. “Morning,” yawns Sasha, stretching her back out in the bunk next to Rhys. Her sister’s bed is empty; unsurprising, Fiona always gets up before any of them. Just another thing that makes her a total freak. “Morning,” Rhys grunts back. “Have a good night's sleep?”

Sasha, through her grogginess, fixes Rhys with a glare. “Not really, cuz you were talking all night.”

“Oh.” Rhys throws her a smile which he hopes comes across as apologetic. “Sorry.”

Sasha rolls over and kicks her legs off the bed, shoving her feet into the boots left on the floor. “Nah, it’s fine. Not like you can prevent having nightmares. What got you so worked up, anyways?”

Rhys scratches absently at the tattoos on his arm. “I think I was dreaming about Helios. The night I left.” He laughs, sharp and cold. “Sort of hard to believe that was three years ago.”

“I know, right?” Sasha stands and stretches another kink out of her back, causing her tank top to ride up a little and expose a strip of copper skin. “I’ve put up with your BS for three years. Where’s the time gone?”

Rhys chucks a pillow at her. 

Cackling, Sasha saunters away from their bunks. “Fi and Vaughn are out on patrol, by the way. Sal and Axton went with.” She walks around to the end of hers to rummage through her trunk for a clean - or as clean as one can get, on Pandora - shirt and a pair of pants. Rhys pays her no mind as she pulls her sleep shirt off, revealing a stretch of scar-speckled brown skin. After three years in cramped quarters and more than one drunken escapade in a hot spring, privacy has gone out the window. While she changes Rhys grabs his cracked ECHOtablet from where it’s still beeping on his nightstand. He’s surprised to find a message from Lilith, and none from Vaughn, who usually leaves him a note if he leaves before Rhys wakes up. “Huh,” he says aloud, tapping Lilith’s name where it glows on the screen. The message board lags a moment, Hyperion logo spinning center-screen as it loads. Rhys desperately wishes he could find a new ECHOtablet somewhere, one that doesn’t give him painful flashbacks every time he needs to use it, but, well, this is Pandora, and pickings are scarce. Fiona’s tablet is at least seven years old and is held together with duct tape and glue. In the long run, this tablet isn’t so bad.

**_0800: (1) UNREAD MESSAGE FROM: LILITH_ **

_Hey killer. Got an important job for you. Stop by HQ as soon as you’re coherent._

“Lilith says she’s got a mission for me,” Rhys says with a note of surprise. “Huh. Wonder what it is.” Sasha snaps her goggles onto her forehead, grimacing. “Must be something important; can’t see them sending off their secret weapon if it wasn’t necessary. Ten bucks says it’s another recon mission.”

“God, I hope not,” Rhys groans. His shirt joins Sasha’s on the floor. “I told you about what happened the last time I did recon, right?”

Sasha laughs. “With the DAHL guy? Yeah, you did. I _cannot_ believe you trusted him. That’s _such_ a rookie mistake.”

“Shaddup,” Rhys grumbles, tossing a sock at Sasha. She easily side-steps it, grinning.

“Anyways,” Rhys continues, “What’s on your schedule for the day? Hunting? Maybe some light sabotage?”

Sasha shrugs her jacket on with a contemplative hum. “I dunno. Hadn’t given it much thought. We’re not moving on Opportunity until next week, and Fiona isn’t here, so...don’t really have anything planned. Might head over to Mox’s place, see if she’s got any work for me.”

Rhys tugs his pants on and stands up. His jacket and chest armour are both flung over the foot of his bed, where they’ve resided since his previous mission. He forgoes the hassle of putting on his armour and instead opts to just throw his jacket on over the black long sleeve he’d wrangled from the disaster that is his trunk. It’s the same jacket he grabbed that night on Helios; his constant companion for every mission he takes on Pandora. For something so insignificant at the time, it’s become a grounding item in his new life. Funny, that. (He’s still got no idea where it came from. Absolutely none.)

“Alright, well, I’m off,” Rhys announces. “Better go see what Lilith wants, before she smites me. If you’re still here when I’m done, we can grab breakfast or something?”

Sasha gives him a thumbs up, mouth currently occupied with the ECHOtablet clenched between her teeth as she tugs a pair of pants on. Rhys salutes her and jogs out of the room, down the narrow steps, and out into the streets of Sanctuary. His fellow Crimson Raiders give him respectful nods as he passes them. Aside from his teammates, he thinks he knows about six of the Raiders by name. Most of them die before he can bother learning them, so it’s sort of pointless anyways. A morbid notion, maybe, but here on Pandora it’s just how things are. Kill or be killed - not that different from Hyperion, honestly.

The HQ door is wide open when he arrives, which seems a little odd given that Tannis will usually throw a bit of a fit if it’s left open even an inch. Any question about it is quickly answered as soon as Rhys steps across the threshold. Tannis has fallen asleep at her desk - that explains it, then. Hard to freak out if you’re sleeping. Though if anyone could manage it, it would be Tannis. He makes sure to close the door as soon as he’s in, just in case. Rhys tiptoes past, careful not to wake her as he trots up the stairs. Lilith is prodding at a holoscreen when he arrives, brow furrowed in a sour way that makes Rhys think this might not end well. With Salvador, Axton, Fiona, and Vaughn out on patrol and Maya and Zer0 on a three-day stakeout in the middle of The Highlands, the briefing room is significantly less crowded. “Good morning,” he says, alerting Lilith of his arrival. Lilith jerks up from her work and the sour expression softens. “Hey, Rhys. Glad you could make it. How you feeling?”

“Tired,” Rhys admits. “But I got your message. What’s going on?”

The sour expression crawls back onto Lilith’s face, this time looking more tired than anything. “Angel got us some new intel this morning.” Normally, this would be good news, but the somber look written across Lilith’s features says otherwise. “Okay,” Rhys says slowly. “And?”

Silence broken only by fingers tapping on a screen fills the room. A three dimensional model shimmers into view atop the table, turning and bobbing slowly as it flickers. It’s some sort of ID drive, or at least looks like one, triangular and metal with a streak of blue light shot through. Other than the blue, it’s totally insignificant. Could belong to anyone - hell, Rhys is almost certain he’s got one almost identical to it stashed in his socks that holds all his pirated ECHOnet webshows. “What...exactly am I looking at?” He leans in to examine it, in case he’s missing something, but even up close there’s nothing about it that jumps out.

Lilith crosses her arms. “Angel, you want to fill him in?”

A warmth at Rhys’ temple alerts him of the A.I.’s presence. Angel’s serene face glitches in and out of focus as the holoscreen tries to keep her image up and running. “Hey, Angel,” Rhys greets. She may be an A.I., but some part of him still feels obligated to treat her as a human. Something about her has always felt...familiar, he supposes. 

“ _Rhys_ ,” Angel replies. Rhys just barely catches the slight smile that accompanies her greeting before she launches into her mission briefing. _“My sensors have picked up the location of this ID drive. It’s one of a kind. Highly confidential. Jack has it locked underground, under approximately ninety-seven feet of concrete.”_

Rhys whistles. “Alright, so it’s important. What’s on it? Hyperion stocks? Jack’s porn stash?”  
 _“Ew,”_ Angel exclaims, recoiling. _“And no. Truthfully, there is nothing on it. Not yet, anyway. It’s a prototype for a masterkey - or will be, once it’s charged. Jack wanted something he could use with all of his systems. It’s on Pandora because his IT specialist is here, but Jack is having it shipped back to Helios in two days.”_

“Okay,” Rhys says slowly. “And if we steal it? Are we just going to piss Jack off?”

Angel smiles wryly, face distorted by static. “ _I can get it up and running. Configure it so it has the access codes for all of the Hyperion personnel and factories currently operating on Pandora. Get the hacked ID drive into a terminal, and I can give you complete control over Jack’s loader bot fabricators. The Crimson Raiders will have a robot army.”_

“Holy sh-” Rhys glances over at Lilith, who is watching Angel’s projection with a grim smile plastered across her face. “This is real?”

Angel gives a slight “hm” of affirmation. “ _All scans have come back free of any tampering or false leads. It’s the real deal.”_

“I know what you’re thinking,” Lilith says, turning to rest her hip against the holotable, “This sounds like a trap. Trust me, I thought it was, too. I mean, no way do we go months without anything substantial only to have this dropped practically in our laps. And I’m still not super keen on it, but Angel hasn’t given us any reason to doubt its authenticity. I don’t want to screw up our only shot at winning this war based on suspicion alone. Besides, the more info I get on it the more I believe it’s real - thing isn’t exactly easy to get to.”

“It sounds like a death trap,” Rhys agrees. They all fall silent, the two sirens watching the A.I. 's video feed bob lazily in a circle over top the holotable’s map. “It’s our best option,” Rhys finally says. “I’ll do it.”

Lilith makes a discontented noise. “Rhys, you don’t have to-”

Rhys shakes his head. “No. We’re losing this war. If we’ve got even the _slightest_ bit of hope to stop Jack and his army, we have to take it. Angel, send me the co-ords. Give me ten minutes. I’ll suit up.”

“ _Already on it, Rhys._ ”

Angel blips out. Sure enough, a string of numbers pops up in Rhys’ ECHOeye interface. He blinks twice to commit them to long-term and they flash blue before disappearing, leaving his vision clear again. Lilith comes back into view holding a thin chain in her hands. She’d apparently stepped out while Rhys was temporarily disabled. “Here,” she says, extending her arm and letting the chain fall from her fingers. A glowing purple pendant dangles from the chain, casting dancing shadows across the walls. “An eridium necklace. Should give you some extra juice. Don’t worry about needing to crush it; it’s cracked already. It’ll keep you going.”

Rhys reaches out, carefully pulling it from Lilith’s fingers with his gloved hand. Even through the tough leather he can feel the eridium’s warmth crawling up his arm. He snaps his fingers shut before the light has a chance to reach his tattoos. “Thanks,” he tells Lilith. “Really. I’ll make you and Roland proud.”

Lilith punches him lightly in the shoulder. “Hey, kid. You already do. Now get going. Pandora isn’t gonna save itself.”

***

Leave it to Handsome Jack to put an underground bunker in the stupidest, most obnoxious place on Pandora. Well, second stupidest. Had Rhys discovered that the bunker was in The Fridge, he would be laughing and tossing this mission onto some other unlucky bastard. Pandora is filled with an innumerable amount of locations that could kill the strongest soldier with a couple ill-placed varkids and some skags, but The Fridge truly deserves the trophy for “Worst Place to Exist Ever”. The one time Rhys went alone, he had to hide in an ice cave until Vaughn could come find him. 

Fuck the Fridge. 

Not that this place is much better. Right now, Rhys is staring at a forty foot wall and wondering how the hell he’s going to scale it. It isn’t like grappling hooks are something he carries around. Technically, he could open his super cool siren wings and fly to the top, but as this is a Hyperion base, he can't risk it. It would be like slathering himself in rakk blood, marching into a skag den, and complaining when he gets attacked. 

There’s a ledge about six feet up the cliff that looks wide enough to stand on; the only problem is actually _getting_ to it. Rhys toes at the bottom of the cliff with the steel plate hammered into his boot. (It’s Pandora. If you don’t have the thing you need, you improvise. In this case, Rhys wanted steel-toed boots.) A decent-sized crack splits the grey rock, jagged and narrow, but Rhys thinks if he positions his foot just right...yeah, he can get a hold. _Don’t get stuck,_ he pleads silently as he grapples for a dip in the rock further up. The stone squeezes tight around his foot; he can feel his boot loosen a little as he yanks it free. _Shit._ Rhys screws his face up in concentration, heaving himself up just a bit more, using the crack in the stone as leverage. There are certainly easier and less terrifying ways to scale a wall, but this will have to do. Finally, _finally,_ Rhys plants his hand on the bumpy surface of the ledge. He flings himself at it, which he regrets the minute he lands badly and gets the breath knocked from his lungs. In the split second he loses focus, he misses the ledge and falls from the rock, sending a few loose pebbles tumbling to the ground. “Fuck!” Rhys curses, catching himself just in the nick of time from plummeting back to the ground. His shoulder screams in pain at the sudden weight and Rhys hauls himself onto the ledge, panting. The remaining cliff face suddenly looks about double the height. “Oh, Jack have mercy,” he moans, planting a hand right on his face. Everything hurts. He’s pretty sure his shoulder is dislocated. There’s dust in his eyes. A skag vomited somewhere down the path. Not the biggest issue, but the wind just picked up and smells really bad.

In the end, it takes him twenty-two minutes - and fourteen seconds, his ECHO helpfully supplies - to scale the whole cliff face. When he finally reaches the top, wheezing from exertion, his neural port warms, signalling Angel’s presence. The first time Angel had done that, Rhys freaked out so bad that Angel, an artificial intelligence, had asked in a very concerned tone of voice if he was alright. Since then, the slight heat and pressure at his temple has become a comforting familiarity. “ _Nice work on the cliff,_ ” Angel says. “ _My apologies for not warning you of it prior. My geographical systems are not as accurate as they could be._ _From my...er, vantage point, that area looks flat._ ”

Rhys snorts, amused by Angel’s disgruntled tone of voice. Sometimes she seems a little too human, and he doesn’t know if that’s a good or bad thing. “Yeah,” he pants. “Clearly.”

“ _Shut up,_ ” Angel harrumphs _._ Rhys chuckles, and on Angel’s end, she does too. “ _Okay, anyways,_ ” she continues, sounding a little further away than normal, like she just leaned away from her comms device, if she had one. Rhys smacks his port to try and get the connection back. “ _What are you doing?_ ” Angel asks. On her end, the speakers have been overpowered by a rapid thudding. “Connection’s gone weird,” Rhys answers, realizing he probably does look rather silly, smacking himself in the side of the head. “Trying to fix it.”

“ _That’s on me,”_ Angel apologizes. “ _You can...stop doing that now._ ”

Rhys stops, cheeks coloured pink.

“ _Okay. Um. Well, when you’re feeling up to it, the entrance to the bunker is about two kilometers north from your current location. I’ll stay online to direct you. It’s in an odd place. Wouldn’t want you to get lost. Or lonely._ ”

Rhys throws a thumbs up clumsily into the air before remembering Angel can’t see it. He drops his hand back onto his chest, embarrassed. “Right. Yeah. That’s cool.” 

It takes ten minutes to recover. Rhys is 99% sure his feet are going to fall off. 

The rest of the trip is filled with craggy, moss-covered rocks and a generous amount of snow. Enough that Rhys is incredibly thankful he thought to put his treads on before leaving. Not enough that he wishes he’d thought to bring a heavier jacket. Actually, the temperature is really quite pleasant, all things considered. As an added bonus, up here, free from bandit camps and Hyperion factories, the air is clean and sweet-smelling. No stench of blood or oil, no dust thick enough to build a sand castle with. Instead, the smell of wet moss and spring water hangs heavy in the air. Rhys pauses to take it all in. In the three years since his escape from Helios, one thing he doesn’t miss is how claustrophobic it made him. He grew up on Eden-4, which was known for being a paradise full of lush plants and crystal-clear lakes. Helios had its season imitators, but there was no denying how artificial it all seemed. Pandora isn’t much better, because everything is coated in a layer of garbage and guts, but at least the few pockets of clean air are a little more like home. 

_“Take a left,_ ” Angel says suddenly in Rhys’ ear. Rhys lets out an embarrassingly shrill scream, slips on a wet rock, and nearly bashes his teeth in on another, only narrowly avoiding it in a mad scramble that leaves him on his ass in a puddle. “ _Christ,_ Angel, some _warning_ ,” he snaps.

“ _I didn’t leave,_ ” Angel replies coolly. Rhys realizes that unfortunately, she’s right. The warmth at his port has been there this whole time. Angel has been _watching_ him this whole time. (He _really_ hopes she didn’t catch the sight of him trying to hit rakks with rocks and accidentally dropping one on his toe. The rock, that is. Not a rakk.) “Whatever,” he grumbles, following Angel’s instructions and turning left. His path - _path_ being used in the loosest of terms - begins to dip down into a small crater. Over the horizon, a familiar yellow is glinting in the morning sun, just as much of an eyesore as ever. “I ever mention how much I hate Hyperion yellow?” Rhys says, partially to himself and partially to Angel, who, being a Hyperion A.I. system, knows the atrocity he’s speaking of. Angel snorts. 

“ _It is awful, isn’t it? Hyperion’s colours used to be black and red, you know. Perhaps a little gothic, but certainly much better than what it is now.”_

Rhys laughs. “Jack’s gotta know how bad it is. There’s no way he thinks it’s a decent colour. Guy’s got to be colourblind or something.”

Angel sighs wearily. “ _You have no idea._ ”

The conversation shifts quickly away from Jack, as neither Rhys nor Angel likes talking about him. They talk instead about everything from the mission to Fiona’s cool new gun, and how she’d found it in a dumpster behind some bandit hovel out in the Dust. (Pandora, they both agree, is full of surprises.) Talking to Angel makes missions much less lonely. It’s become common for Lilith and Roland to send Rhys out on solo missions like this - some sort of trial by fire, he guesses - and each mission, no matter how difficult, Angel always resides in his cybernetics as an unseen companion. She’ll guide him through tricky situations, or just make conversation as Rhys traverses the wasteland that is Pandora. He’s come to think of her as a friend - even though she is just an A.I., she knows him better than anyone. Rhys pretends that’s not because she can spy at him at any given time. 

“Alright,” Rhys says, ducking behind a nearby boulder to keep out of the autocannon’s sight. He hears it whirring and clicking its programmed cycle, front, side, side, front again, and back. 

“Where’s my entrance point?” From his position, the bunker doesn’t look like much. He’s raided more complex things in less than an hour. It’s flat and simplistic, with one large door flanked by digistruct machines, and the autocannon centered above the door. “ _One moment,_ ” Angel tells him. She disappears from his cybernetics briefly. Rhys takes the opportunity to ensure all his guns are fully loaded, and that the eridium necklace Lilith gifted him is still secured around his neck. Angel pops back in as he’s smoothing down his jacket collar. “ _Got it,_ ” she whispers. Why she’s whispering, Rhys can only guess. Dramatic effect, he surmises. “ _There’s a vent around the left side. One screw is weak; the top right one. A quick rap with your gun should do the trick. Be careful; my scans are telling me the drop down is of substantial height.”_

Rhys shoulders his weapons. “Shouldn’t be a problem,” he grunts. Frosted grass crunches under his boots as he slinks past the building, staying low behind a conveniently placed line of rocks. The vent in question is, sure enough, around the left side and twelve feet off the ground. “Fantastic,” Rhys mutters. As if the climb wasn't hard enough on his poor shoulders. As for Angel’s “hit it with your gun idea”, well, that’s not going to work, seeing as he’d need to be twelve feet tall to even reach the damn thing. Instead, he opts for the easier option: blasting the vent cover off with a sniper rifle. Nice and easy. And surprisingly quiet. Except for when the vent falls and clatters to the ground hard enough to wake anything in a thirty mile radius. Rhys curses. This is not going according to plan. Around the bend, he can hear the autocannon engage its targeting system. A robotic voice - Loaders! Damn! - announces a scan for intruders. No time to waste, then. Rhys activates his ECHOeye. Its own targeting system jumps about for a moment, trying to find a path, and Rhys is certain he’s going to get blasted to pieces when _finally_ it stops, lighting up a trail to the vent. Placing his feet in the marked positions, he breaks into a sprint and flies at the wall, just barely catching vent’s edge with his fingers. A breath leaves his chest. His heart is hammering a heavy staccato in his ears. That also might be the approaching Loaders. Either way, he’s not sticking around. He allows himself to use a fraction of Lilith’s eridium to boost himself up smoothly, his arm burning briefly under his coat.

Despite his scrawniness, shoving himself down a vent is not exactly something Rhys is suited for. Just to fit his shoulders in, he’s forced to remove his jacket and toss it down the vent before himself. It slides all the way down, catching on every single bump, nut, and bolt to emit an orchestra of screeching.“I hate this,” he grumbles. His nose gets squashed against the top of the vent as he scoots in. “Angel, if I get stuck, I’m gonna kill you.”

“ _It widens out,_ ” Angel’s calm voice assures him. Rhys glowers at the blank metal vent. He’s met only with his distorted face staring back at him. “It had better,” he grouches. 

It does not widen out. 

Rhys doesn’t get stuck, but he does drop six feet onto solid concrete and cracks approximately every bone in his body. For the sake of stealth, Rhys keeps his snarky remark to himself, even though there’s a nice long list of choice words he would love to have with Angel. Speaking of, the A.I. has been strangely quiet since he dropped down. He taps at his neural port. “Angel,” he hisses. No answer. With a blink, Rhys connects to Sanctuary’s comms instead, and tries again. “Lilith, come in. I’ve made it to the roost; moving forward.”

Silence, then slow, steady static. 

The static gradually rises in intensity, crescendoing into a horrific wailing screech of garbled radio chatter that penetrates Rhys’ brain harsher than a bullet ever could. A hand flies up to his ear, pulling the offending comm link out as it spits and sparks. _What the fuck._

Dead in the water, it would seem. 

Great.

He barely makes it two steps before pain shoots through his skull, searing his brain as if someone has driven a red-hot poker right through his eye. His vision in his ECHOeye distorts, twisting Rhys’ surroundings into psychedelic versions of itself, bright colours dancing across his vision in blotches before the whole eye shorts out with a final shock, stranding Rhys half blind and commless underneath half a mile of concrete. 

Much like grief, panic has seven stages. They are as follows:

#1 - Dismay.

#2 - Hysteria. 

#3 - Desperation.

#4 - Exasperation.

#5 - Anger.

#6 - Negotiation.

#7 - Acceptance.

In roughly thirty seconds, Rhys experiences all of these. _Fuck,_ he thinks, then _I’m going to die down here, oh my god I’m_ going to die, then _this isn’t the end, I’ll be fine, I’ve gotta be fine,_ which turns into _god fucking damnit, this is ridiculous,_ which in turn transitions into a deft punch to the wall and aching fists, and when that only serves to make Rhys even more miserable, he attempts, in vain, to get his cybernetics back up and running. 

At the end of it all, when nothing has worked, he stares ahead at the empty, dim hallway, and decides _what the hell. I’m here, better make the best of it._

And make the best of it he does. 

Honestly, if you’re in a top secret base, why not rub it in that you found it? Rhys takes great pleasure in playing whack-a-mole with the Loaderbots that chase after him. Of course, the moles are the loaders and the hammer is bullets, but fuck technicalities. The sight and sound of Loaderbots getting their limbs shot to shit and exploding into pillars of metal-infused fire is goddamn _satisfying._

He doesn’t need his powers to kick ass. He just needs a good gun and some pent-up anger. Two things that are very easy to obtain down on Pandora. 

At the end of it all, after Hyperion’s cheerful robot mascot lady has declared all reinforcements depleted, Rhys meanders down to the heavily-secured door sat at the dead center of the facility. All things considered it isn’t the fanciest place Rhys has broken into. The whole base is pretty mundane in comparison to other Hyperion facilities down here; Rhys hazards a guess that this is mainly a storage bunker, somewhere under the radar that the resistance wouldn’t bother wasting time on. Clever, really, on Jack’s part. 

Under normal circumstances, Rhys would hack into Hyperion’s security database and open the door, but as that’s not an option right now, he’ll have to settle for a good old-fashioned grenade. The corrosive explosive chews through the door no problem. Squeezing through the hole, though, is a different story, as sizzling acid oozes down like slobber in a skag’s mouth. A drop of it lands on Rhys’ shoulder, eating through the thick fabric jacket. It fizzes out before touching his skin, but he’s just as upset anyway, because that means _another_ hole to patch. By now the jacket looks more like a patchwork quilt sewn by a blind man than a jacket, fine leather replaced by scraps of green or red canvas cut from old supply shippings. The silver lining is that his sewing skills have improved tenfold. 

Rhys isn’t sure what he was expecting, so he’s neither disappointed nor surprised at the sight before him. It’s a simple enough room, nothing fancy, lots of blinking lights and computer terminals, all facing inwards at a significantly fancier terminal. Jacked into the central port, almost in a spotlight, sits Rhys’ objective. It really is just a computer drive. Small, triangular. Sleek, unlike most of Hyperion’s designs. Encased within the dark metal, a prism of translucent blue glass, flickering faintly from a light within. It’s so small, but if it does anything close to what Angel has predicted, the impact it will make will be astronomical. 

Rhys carefully closes his fingers around it. At the shift, a holoscreen turns on. 

_𝚁𝚎𝚖𝚘𝚟𝚎 /𝚏𝚒𝚕𝚎.𝙲𝚘𝚖𝚖𝚊𝚗𝚍.𝚜𝚑𝚒𝚙𝟺.?_

  
_> 𝚈_

  
_> 𝙽_

Rhys hits the “yes” button.

_𝚁𝚎𝚚𝚞𝚎𝚜𝚝 𝚊𝚌𝚌𝚎𝚙𝚝𝚎𝚍. 𝙰𝚠𝚊𝚒𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚊𝚙𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚟𝚊𝚕…_

Rhys chews on his lip. This is highly reminiscent of his days back on Helios. Waiting for system reports. Inputting data. Dying of boredom. 

_𝚁𝚎𝚚𝚞𝚎𝚜𝚝 𝚊𝚙𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚟𝚎𝚍. 𝙿𝚕𝚎𝚊𝚜𝚎 𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚎𝚛 𝚊𝚍𝚖𝚒𝚗𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚝𝚘𝚛’𝚜 𝚙𝚊𝚜𝚜𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚍:_

___ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ ___

_Shit,_ Rhys thinks. This was not in the briefing. He should’ve been prepared, of _course_ Hyperion was going to have security on the damn thing. Yet another problem that could easily be solved with his ECHOeye. Yet another problem he’ll have to solve using his brain. Not that that’s a bad thing. He might be better at hacking with his ECHOeye, but that doesn’t mean he can’t make do without it. He learned without it, the skills are still there. Bonus: it’s fun. Makes it all the more satisfying when the password falls into place from invisible data banks. Poor sucker who owns the account is gonna get a hell of a surprise next time they log in. 

_𝙰𝚍𝚖𝚒𝚗𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚝𝚘𝚛 𝚙𝚊𝚜𝚜𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚍 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚏𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚎𝚍. 𝙷𝚎𝚕𝚕𝚘, 𝙷𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚜𝚘𝚖𝚎._

Well. Oops.

(Thousands of miles away, in a particularly extravagant office overlooking the moon, Handsome Jack’s computer pings with a notification that he’s just been logged in to Terminal 46 on Pandora. He clicks on it, processes it, then immediately forgets about it until two days later when the reminder pops up again and wonders when the hell he went to Terminal 46.)

_𝙲𝚘𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚞𝚎 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚜𝚊𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗?_

_> 𝚈_

_> 𝙽_

Rhys, now resting his head on his hand, pokes at the “yes” key. Seriously, was everything in Hyperion always this boring and complicated? No, scratch that. Of course it was. 

Something in the terminal _clicks_ faintly, almost too quiet to be audible, and the ID drive is ejected. _At last,_ Rhys thinks, rolling his eyes hard enough to strain them. Gently with a gloved hand, Rhys plucks the drive from its port. He’d sort of expected, like, a fanfare or something, but all that happens is the light within the drive sputters out to a dim glow, barely visible through the foggy glass. It sits in his palm, totally innocuous, barely even recognizable as Hyperion tech. Rhys goes to tuck it into his breast pocket and it’s done - the drive’s been located and recovered, now all that’s left is to get the hell out of dodge and deliver it into Lilith’s waiting hands. Rhys turns around just in time to stare directly into the glowing red eye of an EXP Loader.

“Ah, shit,” he says, and then it explodes.


	2. Only Blue Or Black Days

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rhys wakes up in an unfamiliar location.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me, rolling up a month later with starbucks: howdy folks 
> 
> Also FYI this chapter really uh. puts that "graphic depictions of violence" tag to good use so. be warned. sorry.

_𝚂𝙴𝙰𝚁𝙲𝙷𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙵𝙾𝚁 𝙾𝙿𝙴𝙽 𝙻𝙸𝙽𝙴 𝙾𝙵 𝚃𝚁𝙰𝙽𝚂𝙼𝙸𝚂𝚂𝙸𝙾𝙽..._

_𝚂𝙴𝙰𝚁𝙲𝙷𝙸𝙽𝙶…_

_𝚂𝙴𝙰𝚁𝙲𝙷𝙸𝙽𝙶…_

_𝙻𝙸𝙽𝙴 𝙵𝙾𝚄𝙽𝙳. 𝙲𝙾𝙽𝙽𝙴𝙲𝚃𝙸𝙽𝙶…_

_𝚁𝙴𝚀𝚄𝙴𝚂𝚃𝙴𝙳 𝙲𝙾𝙼𝙼𝚄𝙽𝙸𝙲𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽 𝙻𝙸𝙽𝙴 𝚄𝙽𝙰𝙱𝙻𝙴 𝚃𝙾 𝙲𝙾𝙽𝙽𝙴𝙲𝚃. 𝚃𝚁𝚈 𝙰𝙶𝙰𝙸𝙽? 𝚈/𝙽_

**_/𝙴𝚇𝙴𝙲𝚄𝚃𝙴.𝙲𝙾𝙼𝙼𝙰𝙽𝙳:𝚁𝙴𝚁𝙾𝚄𝚃𝙴- >𝙷𝙹𝟼𝟿_:𝙿𝚁𝙸𝙾𝚁𝙸𝚃𝚈 𝙰𝙲𝙲.𝚁𝙴𝙳_ **

_𝚁𝙴𝚃𝚁𝚈𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙲𝙾𝙽𝙽𝙴𝙲𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽. 𝙿𝙻𝙴𝙰𝚂𝙴 𝚆𝙰𝙸𝚃…_

_𝙲𝙾𝙽𝙽𝙴𝙲𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽 𝙵𝙾𝚄𝙽𝙳. 𝙾𝙿𝙴𝙽𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙻𝙸𝙽𝙴..._

**_𝙷𝙹𝟼𝟿:_ ** _𝚊𝚗𝚐𝚎𝚕 𝚠𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚑𝚎𝚕𝚕?? 𝚢 𝚛 𝚞 𝚝𝚡𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚖𝚎 𝚞 𝚜𝚑𝚘𝚞𝚕𝚍 𝚋𝚎 𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚙𝚙𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚎𝚟𝚊𝚌 𝚝𝚎𝚊𝚖_

**_𝟼𝚄𝟺𝚁𝙳𝟷𝟺𝙽𝟺𝙽𝟼𝟹𝚕:_ ** _𝚃𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚎’𝚜 𝚋𝚎𝚎𝚗 𝚊 𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚙𝚕𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗._

**_𝙷𝙹𝟼𝟿:_ ** _𝚠𝚝𝚏 𝚍𝚘 𝚞 𝚖𝚎𝚊𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚜 𝚋𝚎𝚎𝚗 𝚊 𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚙𝚕𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗, 𝚊𝚗𝚐𝚎𝚕, 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚒𝚜𝚗𝚝 𝚛𝚘𝚌𝚔𝚎𝚝 𝚜𝚌𝚒𝚎𝚗𝚌𝚎 𝚒𝚝𝚜 𝚊 𝚐𝚘𝚍𝚍𝚊𝚖𝚗 𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚌𝚞𝚎 𝚘𝚙_

**_𝟼𝚄𝟺𝚁𝙳𝟷𝟺𝙽𝟺𝙽𝟼𝟹𝚕:_ ** _𝚂𝚎𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚢𝚘𝚞𝚛𝚜𝚎𝚕𝚏._

**_/𝚃𝚁𝙰𝙽𝚂𝙼𝙸𝚃_𝙵𝙸𝙻𝙴.𝙽𝚆𝙾𝚄𝚃𝙿𝙰𝚃𝙲𝙷.𝙲𝙰𝙼𝟷𝟿.𝙼𝙿𝙴𝙶-𝟺 - >𝙷𝙹𝟼𝟿_ **

**_𝙷𝙹𝟼𝟿:_ ** _𝚘𝚑 𝚎𝚠 𝚐𝚛𝚘𝚜𝚜 𝚒𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚊𝚛𝚖???_

**_𝟼𝚄𝟺𝚁𝙳𝟷𝟺𝙽𝟺𝙽𝟼𝟹𝚕:_ ** _𝚆𝚑𝚊𝚝’𝚜 𝚕𝚎𝚏𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝚒𝚝, 𝚢𝚎𝚜._

**_𝙷𝙹𝟼𝟿:_ ** _𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚠 𝚘𝚔 𝚒 𝚐𝚎𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚙𝚕𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚗𝚘𝚠. 𝚏𝚛𝚒𝚔𝚔𝚒𝚗 𝚗𝚊𝚜𝚝𝚢. 𝚌𝚊𝚗 𝚞 𝚊𝚌𝚌𝚎𝚜𝚜 𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚜𝚢𝚜𝚝𝚎𝚖𝚜?_

**_𝟼𝚄𝟺𝚁𝙳𝟷𝟺𝙽𝟺𝙽𝟼𝟹𝚕:_ ** _...𝙽𝚘, 𝚜𝚒𝚛. 𝙷𝚎’𝚜 𝚕𝚘𝚜𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚋𝚕𝚘𝚘𝚍, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚏𝚊𝚜𝚝. 𝙵𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚖𝚒𝚗𝚞𝚝𝚎𝚜 𝚞𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚕 𝚒𝚛𝚛𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚒𝚋𝚕𝚎 𝚋𝚛𝚊𝚒𝚗 𝚍𝚊𝚖𝚊𝚐𝚎. 𝙴𝚟𝚊𝚌 𝚝𝚎𝚊𝚖 𝚒𝚜 𝚝𝚎𝚗 𝚖𝚒𝚗𝚞𝚝𝚎𝚜 𝚘𝚞𝚝. 𝙷𝚘𝚠 𝚜𝚑𝚊𝚕𝚕 𝙸 𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚌𝚎𝚎𝚍?_

**_𝙷𝙹𝟼𝟿:_ ** _𝚂𝙷𝙸𝚃 𝚘𝚔 𝚞𝚑_

**_𝙷𝙹𝟼𝟿:_ ** _𝚘𝚔 𝚐𝚘𝚝 𝚒𝚝. 𝚒𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚑𝚘𝚕𝚘 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚏𝚛𝚘𝚖 𝚌𝚢𝚋𝚎𝚛 𝚞𝚙 𝚗 𝚛𝚞𝚗𝚗𝚒𝚗𝚐???_

**_𝟼𝚄𝟺𝚁𝙳𝟷𝟺𝙽𝟺𝙽𝟼𝟹𝚕:_ ** _𝚆𝚎𝚕𝚕, 𝚢𝚎𝚜, 𝙹𝚊𝚌𝚔, 𝚋𝚞𝚝 𝚒𝚝’𝚜 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚎𝚡𝚊𝚌𝚝𝚕𝚢 𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚋𝚕𝚎. 𝙸𝚏 𝚢𝚘𝚞’𝚛𝚎 𝚜𝚞𝚐𝚐𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝙸 𝚊𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚊𝚝𝚎 𝚒𝚝, 𝙸’𝚖 𝚊𝚏𝚛𝚊𝚒𝚍 𝚒𝚝 𝚖𝚊𝚢 𝚜𝚑𝚞𝚝 𝚍𝚘𝚠𝚗. 𝙰𝚕𝚜𝚘, 𝚏𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚖𝚒𝚗𝚞𝚝𝚎𝚜._

**_𝙷𝙹𝟼𝟿:_ ** _𝚊𝚗𝚐𝚒𝚎 𝚠𝚎 𝚛 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚕𝚎𝚝𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚑𝚒𝚖 𝚍𝚒𝚎. 𝚑𝚘𝚕𝚘 𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚐𝚛𝚊𝚖 𝙽𝙾𝚆._

**_𝟼𝚄𝟺𝚁𝙳𝟷𝟺𝙽𝟺𝙽𝟼𝟹𝚕:_ ** _𝚅𝚎𝚛𝚢 𝚠𝚎𝚕𝚕. 𝙴𝚗𝚜𝚞𝚛𝚎 𝚍𝚘𝚌𝚔𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚋𝚊𝚢 𝟼-𝟷𝟼 𝚒𝚜 𝚌𝚕𝚎𝚊𝚛 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚊𝚗 𝙸𝙲𝚄 𝚝𝚎𝚊𝚖 𝚒𝚜 𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚋𝚢 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚒𝚖𝚖𝚎𝚍𝚒𝚊𝚝𝚎 𝚝𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚜𝚙𝚘𝚛𝚝. 𝙲𝚘𝚗𝚝𝚊𝚌𝚝 𝙱𝚒𝚛𝚍𝚒𝚎 𝙰𝚂𝙰𝙿; 𝚠𝚎 𝚗𝚎𝚎𝚍 𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚒𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚞𝚗𝚒𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚖𝚘𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚁𝚑𝚢𝚜 𝚊𝚛𝚛𝚒𝚟𝚎𝚜. 𝚂𝚑𝚎’𝚜 𝚐𝚘𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚘 𝚋𝚎 𝚟𝚒𝚝𝚊𝚕 𝚒𝚏 𝚠𝚎 𝚠𝚊𝚗𝚝 𝚑𝚒𝚖 𝚝𝚘 𝚜𝚞𝚛𝚟𝚒𝚟𝚎._

**_𝙷𝙹𝟼𝟿:_ ** _𝚞 𝚐𝚘𝚝 𝚒𝚝 𝚋𝚊𝚋𝚎_

**_𝟼𝚄𝟺𝚁𝙳𝟷𝟺𝙽𝟺𝙽𝟼𝟹𝚕_ ** _𝚑𝚊𝚜 𝚍𝚒𝚜𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚗𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚎𝚍._

**_𝙷𝙹𝟼𝟿_ ** _𝚑𝚊𝚜 𝚍𝚒𝚜𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚗𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚎𝚍._

**_/𝙱𝙾𝙾𝚃𝚂𝚈𝚂𝚃𝙴𝙼.𝚁𝙴𝙽𝙴𝙶𝙰𝙳𝙴𝚂𝙴𝙿𝙸𝙲𝙷𝙾𝙻𝙾𝙱𝙰𝙱𝚈.𝙿𝚁𝙾𝙶𝚁𝙰𝙼_ **

_𝙿𝚁𝙾𝙶𝚁𝙰𝙼 𝚂𝚄𝙲𝙲𝙴𝚂𝚂𝙵𝚄𝙻𝙻𝚈 𝙻𝙰𝚄𝙽𝙲𝙷𝙴𝙳. 𝙻𝙾𝙲𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽 𝚁𝙴𝚀𝚄𝙴𝚂𝚃 - 𝙾𝚄𝚃𝚁𝙴𝙰𝙲𝙷.𝙾𝚄𝚃𝙿𝙰𝚃𝙲𝙷 - 𝙰𝙿𝙿𝚁𝙾𝚅𝙴𝙳. 𝙷𝙾𝙻𝙾𝙶𝚁𝙰𝙼 𝙳𝙴𝙿𝙻𝙾𝚈𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙸𝙽: 𝟻. 𝟺. 𝟹. 𝟸. 𝟷._

_𝙷𝙾𝙻𝙾𝙶𝚁𝙰𝙿𝙷𝙸𝙲 𝙿𝚁𝙾𝙹𝙴𝙲𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽 𝚂𝚄𝙲𝙲𝙴𝚂𝚂𝙵𝚄𝙻. 𝟼𝚄𝟺𝚁𝙳𝟷𝟺𝙽𝟺𝙽𝟼𝟹𝚕.𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚐𝚛𝚊𝚖 𝚁𝚄𝙽𝙽𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝚂𝙼𝙾𝙾𝚃𝙷𝙻𝚈. 𝙷𝙴𝙻𝙻𝙾, 𝙼𝙰’𝙰𝙼._

  
  


***

It’s the muffled sound of electronic beeping that finally rouses Rhys from whatever purgatorial sleep his body has slipped into. It’s faint, at first, quiet enough that Rhys thinks he might be imagining it, but then it grows steadier. Louder. Wait, no, it’s not the beeping getting louder, Rhys’ brain is just coming back to full consciousness. New sounds, different sounds, _unpleasant_ sounds begin filtering in through the fog of Rhys’ delirium. An uncomfortable ringing that develops into a loud, monotonous roar. The mechanical beeping that’s speeding up and slowing down every few seconds. Unintelligible chatter between people out of Rhys’ narrow line of sight. He sucks in a shallow breath, and that, too, sounds muffled and far away. The air tastes almost sweet, or artificial, like somebody has tried so hard to create air that they forgot air doesn’t usually taste and smell like candy. And not good candy, like the sweets Vaughn used to buy from the shop near their college, but the cheap, mass-produced, overly sweet, synthetic stuff Helios kept stocked in the 24-hour convenience stores scattered around the station. Rhys takes another breath, and that sweet taste floods his senses again, this time mixed with plastic and rubber. In his fog-addled brain the dots aren’t close enough for him to draw together; they float in circles, almost touching, but as realization dawns on Rhys they drift apart again, and he’s back to square one. All he can gather is that wherever he is, it certainly isn’t Pandora. 

The far-off chattering he was hearing suddenly ceases. Shadows shift in the corner of his eye, blurred into blotchy silhouettes by the bright lights and Rhys' hazy eyesight. People, turning to stare at him. One of them, a tall, reasonably slender blurry shape, detaches from the larger, even blurrier shape. Rhys’ vision is swimming in and out of focus, but it’s steady enough to vaguely make out a face leaning over him. “Still alive, then?” the tall blurry shape says, producing something pointy and shiny - _ooh, shiny!_ \- and bending closer. “Well, back to sleep. Can’t have you straining yourself.”

A sharp prick in his shoulder, and warmth floods Rhys’ veins, sending slow, pulsing bursts of liquid pleasure through his body. It feels...it feels like hot summer days on Eden-4, ones spent splashing in the waters of a lake so blue it put the sky to shame. He drifts off with a smile on his face, oblivious to the bloody bandages left strewn in a pile around the stump where his arm used to be. 

***

Helios has fifteen docking bays - or so it says in the system. There’s actually sixteen, given Handsome Jack’s paranoia and the fact that years ago Helios was attacked and there was no way off. The sixteenth docking bay is located two floors down from the main bays, in a secret corridor unknown to everybody but Hyperion’s - or rather, _Jack’s_ \- most trusted advisors. It’s here that the evac shuttle docks, barrelling into the bay with enough speed that a record number of papers and assorted knicknacks go flying across the floor, which prompts everybody in the general vicinity to heave a collective sigh and resign themselves to the fact that they’re going to be spending money on more paperweights. The shuttle doors rattle open with a hiss, a metal ramp shuttling out from the catwalk to provide a crossing for the passengers. A medical team is already on standby; twelve doctors and nurses in white coats, faces hidden by masks and visors, are waiting to greet the disembarking evac team and their comatose patient. “What the fuck,” exclaims a doctor whose bright pink hair is visible even under her hairpiece. “What the fuck did you _do_ to him?” She leans over the patient, who, quite frankly, looks more like a corpse than a living person, if she’s honest. His lips are white, washing out his already paled face. If it weren’t for the soft, fluttering puffs of warm air escaping from between his paling lips, the doctor would have written him off as DOA. “Alright, degenerates,” she barks, straightening up to her full height of five-feet-and-four-inches, and loudly clapping her hands together, “Med Bay suite one-oh-nine! Get your lazy butts in gear! If this one dies, you’re all joining him!”

Still shouting orders at her team, the pink-haired doctor and her team disappear through a set of heavy sliding doors that shut with a _thud_ that rocks the hangar. 

The docking bay falls uncomfortably silent. 

A single piece of paper drifts from a desk, settling on the floor text-side up. _Injured?_ It reads in blocky Hyperion text. _Cybertech can help!_

In the wake of it all, the few dock workers left behind ease themselves out of whatever hiding place they’d squeezed into, brush away the dust, and amid annoyed whispers begin the lengthy process of reorganizing the whole docking bay. 

***

One hundred stories above, Handsome Jack is playing darts with a photo of Maliwan’s CEO and approximately seventy knives, all laid out neatly across a golden dish. As one expertly hits the larger-than-life poster right between the eyes, a hologram sputters to life in the middle of his floor, arms crossed, wearing a highly unamused expression on its projected face. “Oh, hi,” it says, in a tired, more-than-annoyed tone.“Thanks for your help.”

Jack spins around in his chair, eyes blown wide in startled surprise, until they settle on the flickering hologram that’s just appeared beside his desk. His mask splits into a wide grin. “Angel! Hey, baby, how goes the rescue mish?” 

Angel glowers at her father. “Terrible,” she responds coolly. She tosses her curtain of black hair over her shoulder so her solitary green eye glints out at Jack through the strands. “He flatlined twice on the way here. Don’t-” she warns, as Jack opens his mouth to undoubtedly demand an execution order on the people who saved Rhys’ life, “-Even think about it. He lost nearly two litres of blood; when we picked him up he had already gone into hypovolemic shock. One of the on-deck nurses had to get hooked up to a drip just so Rhys wouldn’t bleed out.” 

Any snide comment that had been boiling in Jack’s brain disappears. “Fuck,” he says instead, slumping back in his chair. “He gonna be okay?” 

Angel shrugs her slim shoulders. The tattoos on her arm shift in the pixelated light provided by her hologram. “At this moment, I can’t say, although the team was able to stabilize him just after takeoff. They were forced to use…” She hesitates. Her fingers flex around her biceps, discomfort evident even through the glitchy connection. “...Unfavourable measures.” 

“Angel,” Jack says slowly. He leans forward, knitting his fingers together in front of his chin. “What sort of measures? The fuck did they do?”

Angel chews her lip. “Dad, all that matters is that he’s okay, right? I mean-”

“Angel,” Jack repeats quietly. “What did they use?” It isn’t a question. His voice has dropped into a deadly calm cadence. “Dad,” Angel pleads softly. 

“ _Angel._ ”

Angel tosses her hands into the air. “Fucking _slag!_ They used slag, okay? Purified slag!”

At her response, Jack closes his eyes and hisses out a breath. He isn’t... _outwardly_ angry, but Angel knows her father well enough to know that under his calm demeanor he’s secretly seething. His fingers clench around the armrests of his elaborate throne, turning his knuckles white. “Have those _imbeciles,_ ” he spits, “Learned _nothing?_ ”

Angel touches the implants in her skull. Their warmth buzzes through her arm, pleasantly hot. “It was the only way,” she says softly. “Really, it was.” Jack continues to look less than pleased - but Angel’s giving him her best puppy eyes, and even now at twenty one years of age she’s still able to convince him to back down. His grip on the chair lessens up a bit. “Watch your fuckin’ language, kid,” he grumbles. “You’re starting to sound like me. What would your mom say?”

“Something reprimanding you, I imagine,” Angel says airily. “Your horrid parenting in particular. I wouldn’t know half these words without such a, ah, _civil_ father.” Jack grunts in agreement. Angel learned some rather mature language when she was much too young; although the look on former exec Andrew Antileggo’s face when a twelve-year-old Angel told him to “Pull his head out of her business and stick it up his arse where it belongs” , had _almost_ been worth it. Almost. 

Angel’s started pacing, which is never a good sign. “What’s up, baby girl?” Jack asks. He rises from his throne and descends the few steps that lead to his desk, looking for all the world like a king going to greet his subjects, tall and regal and wearing a Hyperion sweater so patched up it looks like a failed R&D experiment. Yeah, the sweater sort of hinders the “kingly” vibe he’s going for. And the untied sneakers. “Somethin’ got you down?”

Angel bites her lip. “I just assisted in kidnapping my friend,” she answers after a moment’s hesitation, “I’m currently projecting my consciousness into an _experimental_ hologram which has _never_ been tested, and at twenty one years old I am co-leading a world war. In secret. While playing the role of double agent. Does that count as “something getting me down”?”

“Okay, first of all,” Jack begins, “You know as well as anyone that Birdie’s a smart cookie. A smart, badass cookie who could build a working tank out of a pile of sticks and some cans. This hologram? Super safe. And as for the siren? Well. It was for his own good.” He goes to put a hand on Angel’s shoulder before remembering her current state of being and retracts it as pixels crackle from the near-contact. Angel stares at him, incredulous. “He’s going to hate me, Dad.”

“Nah, he’ll be fine,” Jack says, waving his hand dismissively. “‘Sides, ‘s not like he’s here to make friends.”

Angel’s tattoos pulse dangerously. “Dad. _Jack_ . I have, including you, exactly three friends in this universe. I am _not_ going to lose one of them over your stupid get-powerful-quick scheme.” 

“Aw, sugarbear,” Jack says, an edge of mockery tinging his voice, “I’m your friend?”

Angel’s glare, had she been physical, could have bored a hole straight through Jack’s chest and out into the cosmos. 

“ _Anyways_ ,” she continues, saccharine sweet over barbed wire intent, “I’ve got other work to do. Call me if you need anything _important._ I’m not a virtual assistant; stop asking me to order you a smoothie from the food court. Walk there yourself, or get Meg to do it.”

With that, she’s gone, simply blipping out of existence with a _pop_ similar in nature to television sets of old. Jack huffs out a breath, hands planting firmly on his waist. 

Kids. 

***

Rhys isn’t sure if he’s dreaming. His brain is swimming with visions of blood, the cool white ceiling of a surgical suite, an extraordinarily pretty girl with dark hair and blue eyes, and for some reason, Handsome Jack’s face floating above him, poster-perfect as ever. He wonders if he’s been knocked out hard enough that that tiny, annoying little bit of his brain that still lingers from his stint as Handsome Jack’s #1 fanboy has managed to reach his surface thoughts. Which, if it has, means he’s in real deep shit, because that little tidbit of his past is the one (1) thing he’s managed to hide not only from the Crimson Raiders, but also repress enough he can go many days in blissful ignorance of that whole phase. 

Apart from Jack’s pretty, pretty face and the bright ceiling, there’s also a steady drumming in his head - muffled, yes, but there. Even when he slips back under, in the few seconds where his mind is still conscious and aware of itself, the drumming continues, this steady, steady beat rumbling in the back of his head. Rhys feels time pass in clouded confusion, unable to differentiate seconds from minutes and minutes from hours. Unbeknownst to him, Rhys has been in this state for nearly a week now, drifting in and out of consciousness, only retaining vague memories from the few minutes he’s awake each day, and even those are weak, watered-down things, barely memories, more flashes of lights and sound he can recall if he tries. 

But when he’s under, Rhys dreams. 

***

_“You know you’re going to get airlocked, right?” His sister eyes the boxes getting loaded into the moving van with trepidation. Her hands rest easily on her hips, and if it weren’t for the deep lines etched into her forehead from her frown, she’d look relaxed on her perch atop the old couch Rhys had given to her after it wouldn’t fit in the van. “And you know you’ve said that twelve times already, right?” Rhys shoots back over his shoulder while he shoves a large box labelled “KITCHEN” into the back corner of the van. Gwen blows a strand of hair out of her eye with a petulant huff. “Excuse me for being worried that my baby brother is getting sent to the place voted “Deadliest Place to Work Ever”, and that you’re also the biggest dolt in the eight galaxies.”_

_Rhys scowls. “I’ll be fine, Gwen. Vaughn’ll be with me.”_

_“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” Gwen says flatly, crossing her arms. “I love the guy like a brother, but he’s not exactly, uh, what’s a nice way of saying “Totally useless in a fight because he jumps at everything”? Because he’s that.”_

_“C’mon, Gwen,” Rhys chides. “You’re overthinking this. I know my worth; I’ll show anyone who doubts me who’s boss.”_

_“Them?”_

“Me, _” Rhys snaps, flipping her off. “Stop worrying. It’s just a year, and then I’ll be able to choose which location I want to work at.”_

_Gwen stands up and stretches, showing off the dragon tattoo that takes up most of her side. “Right, because it’s totally not your dream to be working on the same station your gay crush works at.”_

_Rhys glares at her with as much contempt as he can muster, even though his cheeks are pinking in embarrassment. “It’s not like I think I’ve got a chance,” he mumbles. His face turns a shade darker. “Helios is just the best place to become someone, you know?”_

_Gwen rolls her eyes. “Whatever, nerd boy. Tell me, what the hell are you gonna do about this?” She saunters over and, rather aggressively, yanks up the sleeve of Rhys’ pressed teal shirt, revealing the swirling tattoos underneath. They pulse gently as they’re exposed to sunlight, and Rhys flushes, swatting his sister’s hand away so he can pull the sleeve back down. “Don’t touch that!” He hisses, glancing warily around the street for any onlookers. Gwen regards him with a judgemental raise of an eyebrow. “Yeah, because that’s not suspicious at all. What’s gonna happen when your work uniform turns out to be a shortsleeve, huh? You’ve seen the Hestia branch interns; they’re in t-shirts!” Her voice drops to a whisper. “Rhys, if someone finds out you’re a siren on Helios, you’re gonna be wishing you were dead.”_

_Rhys pulls away. His face is hot, and so is his arm, cradled in the opposite, fingers bunching the fabric of his shirt. “Jeezus, I_ know, _Gwen. Which is why,” he begins, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out his phone, “I was hoping you could cover them with this.”_

_The tattoo turns out to cover most of his left side. It’s perfect - Gwen’s matched the colour to his siren ones flawlessly, and made the design fit the natural twists and spirals of his markings in a way that makes it look completely innocent. Even if someone were to see him without a shirt or short sleeves, all they’d see was Gwen’s masterful handiwork, and nothing would give away his true heritage. “I love it,” Rhys breathes as Gwen wipes off the rest of the antibacterial foam. She grins, setting the used towels on a tray. “Not a bad idea, nerd boy,” she admits. “Now, as payment, you’ve gotta tell anyone that asks that it was your super-cool tattoo artist sister who inked you. Passive Moon Tattoos. Hestia, Eden-4. Don’t forget it.”_

_Rhys laughs, throwing his newly-tattooed arm around his sister’s shoulders. “Yeah, yeah. Trust me, I’ll get you your clients. Thanks again, G. Really. It means a lot.”_

_His sister bumps her shoulder against his side. “Hey. It’s my sworn duty to keep you safe. Even if it means jamming a million tiny needles into your flesh.”_

_“Don’t say you didn’t enjoy it,” Rhys jokes. Gwen rolls her eyes, even though she’s smiling. Rhys reaches for his coat, meaning to retrieve his phone to text Vaughn, but a hand grabs his arm before he can reach it._

_The hand whips him around, and it’s only Gwen, but her eyes are unfocused and glassy. “This won’t work, you know,” she says. Rhys stammers out a “What?” but Gwen doesn’t seem to hear him. “It won’t work,” she continues. “They’re going to catch you. They’re going to see.”_

_Her eyes flick up at him, big and full of tears. As he watches, frozen, blood trickles from a circular hole in her forehead. Drips down into her eyes. Spatters her pale cheeks red. “They’re going to take me first,” she hisses. “To get to you. They’re going to kill me, and then they’re going to kill Mom, and then Vaughn, and anyone else you’ve ever loved! Because we are just targets, and you’ve doomed us all!”_

_Rhys opens his mouth to cry out, but nothing comes. A bright, harsh flash of light explodes behind Gwn, devouring her little tattoo parlor bit by bit until she, too, is consumed, letting loose a shrill wail that fades only after she’s gone. The floor disappears from beneath Rhys’ feet and suddenly he’s falling, spinning in an endless dark as voices surround him._

_“Pandora isn’t gonna save itself...”_

_“-Where you go, I go. No questions asked…”_

_“-Flatlining! Lower slag levels by fifteen percent-”_

_“-I’m sorry, Rhys. I’m so sorry.”_

_“-been a hell of a time finding you, y’know.”_

_Rhys hits the ground. Hard. Around him, the air is still. Quiet. Yet it’s so far from serene, Rhys would rather be on Pandora, mid-gunfight. He looks down. He’s dressed, to his confusion, in his old Hyperion uniform. Striped pants. Honeycomb vest. That stupid red tie. Hadn’t he burned these?_

_“Rhys,” a voice calls from the darkness. Rhys whips around, tattoos lighting instinctively. Nothing. He’s alone, in an endless stretch of blackness. “Rhys,” the voice calls again, a little more insistently. It sounds closer, and a little familiar, too. “Hello?” He shouts, flexing his glowing hand at his side. It’s growing hot as his Phasebreak itches to be let loose._

_“Hello,” the voice echoes, directly behind him. Rhys screeches, spinning back and jumping a foot in the air as he comes face-to-face with a young woman. “Who…?” he manages, once his heart has started beating again. The girl raises a hand to shush him. He notes, with a hint of distress, that her hand, too, is patterned with the siren’s mark. She blinks a blue eye, the other obscured behind a curtain of dark hair. “Rhys,” she says again. “You must wake up. You have been sleeping for much too long.”_

_“Who are you?” Rhys breathes. She looks so familiar…_

_“Unimportant, for the moment,” the girl says matter-of-factly. Her outstretched hand comes to rest its fingertips on Rhys’ forehead, just above his eyebrows. He goes cross-eyed trying to see them. Those blue tattoos, a little lighter than his own, and a little less abrasive, start to glow pure white against her already pale skin. “Follow my voice,” she murmurs, “And wake UP!”_

Rhys’ eyes fly open. The stinging scent of rubbing alcohol hits him almost as quickly as he searingly bright hospital lights; he hears himself let out a hiss of pain at such an overload of the senses. It sounds tinny and far away, like he’s hearing himself through a long tunnel or hovering just outside a door. His breathing, ragged and rapid, seems to be in a similar vein. Everything sounds distant. The steady electronic beep of a machine sounds off somewhere to his left side, one in an orchestra of other mechanical noises rattling off of the machines keeping Rhys alive. Something plasticky crinkles each time he shifts his head, trying to get comfortable. Even the telltale itch of an IV stuck in the vein of his arm feels muted, somehow. He’s vaguely aware of another itch around his neck, under which a thinly veiled aching burn has begun to make itself known. The smallest twitch of his head sends a jolt of redhot pain shooting up the right side of his face and a shrill whimper to make it past his lips. Rhys elects it might just be best to stay still for the time being. 

Minutes pass as he struggles to come back to himself, trapped in an endless loop of overstimulation and aching, throbbing pain. His eyes burn and his eyelids continue to flutter shut, but as if he’s being electrified each time he tries to close them, he can’t keep them closed. His right side is somehow both completely numb and also on fire, which is a horrendous paradox altogether. 

Finally, after an eternity of being stuck in drugged-up, painful hell, his eyes clear. To a degree. At least, in one eye. In the other, there’s just...white. Something whitehot grabs hold of his heart and _twist_ ; panic, rearing its ugly head. His heartbeat speeds up again as he desperately tries to blink his blinded eye. Nothing. Just white. Another pained whine wrenches itself from his throat, bringing with it tears that make his vision blur into one huge blob of splotchy whites and grays. 

He can feel tears spilling from his left eye. It’s a small relief, Rhys supposes, in a brief moment where his brain isn’t short circuiting, that he can _feel_ tears on that side of his face. It means he’s still got an eye. Which is preferable, at least to him. And yet, as tears roll down his right cheek, dripping onto his chest and wetting the skin there, too, the miracle tears from his maybe-not-missing eye are very stubbornly not moving. They stay right where they are, held in place by - oh. Rhys scrunches up his cheek to test the theory and yep, it’s cotton. The white he’s seeing isn’t a horrible blindness, it’s just gauze. Just generic, run-of-the-mill, hospital grade gauze. He moves his arm, the one with feeling returning to it, up to prod the cotton pad. It’s soft and the fibres catch on his calloused fingers, which twitch and ache at the sudden use after nearly a week spent atrifying in bed. His hand fumbles around for a moment, finally finding the tougher, plasticky surface of the medical tape keeping the pad adhered to his skin. He scratches at it with blunt, bitten down nails, brain so foggy he can hardly think straight enough to find the edge. His other arm hangs limply at his side, and Rhys can only assume it’s stuck so full of IVs pumping drugs into his system the whole thing’s been numbed. Eventually, after three minutes of trying - and failing - to peel off the gauze, Rhys gives up and shuts his blinded eye. (It doesn’t go unnoticed that it’s the same eye that backfired in the Hyperion bunker; Rhys wouldn’t be surprised if the sudden shortage of the ECHOdevice fried something badly enough to warrant the cotton eye patch.) 

With the distraction of the patch taken care of, at least temporarily, Rhys blinks his other eye to clear it and tries to get a good look at his surroundings, or as good as one can get without moving their head. 

It’s a hospital room, no doubt about it. If that weren’t already obvious from the small army of IV drips and monitors displaying his vitals, all while serenading him with a lovely melody of loud beeps, clicks, and noises that can only be described as the sound a metal pellet going down a garburator might make, then the decor is what really drives that point home. 

The room Rhys has woken up in isn’t terribly large, certainly not bigger than the one he shares with Vaughn, Sasha, and Fiona back home, but maybe more square instead of rectangular. It’s all very clean and sharp, the only really “comfort” decoration on Rhys’ side of the room being a short white table with a cutesy little radio sat on it. It’s turned off. There’s a sticky note plastered to the front with _DO NOT TOUCH!!!_ scribbled on it in spidery writing. Cheerful. It’s nearly lost in the jungle of IV stands and large, boxy medical devices swarming his bedside. One of them, a vaguely box-shaped thing with a small window cut out of it to show off an array of four brightly coloured liquids in vials, chitters something in its robot language and Rhys watches, transfixed, as a tiny plunger pushes down into the vial filled with dark purple liquid. It drips into a translucent tube which runs down a curly, twisted path that connects to one of several IV needles shoved into Rhys’ tattooed arm. The purple fluid runs sluggishly through the tube, pushed along by an unseen airflow being blown through one end. Rhys feels a little sick as it enters his body, watching as the veins around the needle glow purple for a second as the first drop makes contact. The second it begins feeding into his veins, a hot burst blooms in his arm and gradually spreads through his body, leaving Rhys pleasantly sated and delightfully warm. Gradually he feels his body lax, muscles loosening to allow Rhys to sink into the soft mattress. His head lolls to one side, a dopey grin playing on his lips. A few seconds of silence follow, where Rhys’ gaze floats freely around the room before focusing on a painting of a white orchid hanging on the wall directly opposite him. 

There’s an actual white orchid sat on a glass table immediately below it. 

Somebody must really like orchids. 

(And the colour white, if literally everything in the room is anything to go by.) Even the stiff looking chairs squatting on a fuzzy carpet are white, and are nearly shiny enough to blend in with the walls. The only break in the monotone colour scheme is the sliding glass door to his right Rhys imagines leads in and out, and a heavy steel bulkhead to his left. This place couldn’t be less Pandoran if it tried - the “medbay” in Sanctuary was just Dr. Zed’s clinic, and Rhys was half convinced just _walking_ _in there_ would give him tetanus or bone rot or something equally nasty. Here, Rhys can’t see even a single spot that isn’t shiny and clean. Granted, he’s half blind right now and his one good eye is running at a solid 4 FPS, but the point still stands. Wherever he is? Not Pandora. Or at least, not in a bandit camp. 

Maybe he’s still dreaming. Maybe this is a coma. 

Sort of a shitty dream to be stuck in a coma with, to be completely honest. He’d always hoped that in the off chance he fell into a coma, he’d have a fun dream. Maybe with pretty girls and hot boys who _weren’t_ his worst enemy or whatever weird phantom that dark-haired girl had been. That would be lovely. This? Waking up with four needles in his arm, half his body numbed, and only one eye? Not lovely. Severely not lovely. So far from lovely it isn’t even in one of the eight galaxies anymore. Whole new solar system. One that sucks. A lot. Where nobody can feel the right side of their body and also only have one eye. And they can’t turn their heads more than an inch to either side. 

Yeah. 

That makes sense. 

Man, his brain is fried. 

Rhys wiggles his fingers, trying to get some feeling back in his hand and arm. The sheets beneath him are weirdly soft to the touch, completely unlike any other hospital bed Rhys has ever been in before. (Which was several. Like, a lot. Honestly, probably too many.) Hell, even the sheets in the Cybertech medbay were rougher than these, which is saying something because those were soft as _fuck._ Perhaps the silken sheets should have caused Rhys more alarm than they did, but at this point he’s too tired and too groggy to care all that much. That warm, cozy feeling from the IV is taking hold again and he’s beginning to feel his eyelids grow heavy. He can nap a bit more, right? Just...a little...bit…

“ _Rhys._ ” 

Rhys’ eyes fly open. 

A familiar heat presses at his temple, close to his neural port. His mouth is forming the name before he even thinks it. “Angel?” 

There’s that laugh, as clean and pure as a silver bell on a sunny day. “ _Oh, good. Your brain_ is _working._ _How are you feeling?_ ” 

A beat. Rhys’ mouth apparently forgets how to work, or just decides not to, because suddenly his tongue feels heavy and tastes sour. He licks his lips. There’s a bizarre aftertaste that hits him; lip balm, maybe? “I feel,” Rhys says slowly, taking the time to form each word carefully, which stretches a relatively short sentence into a long, painstakingly attentive one. “Like I’ve been kicked off a cliff. Where am I? Wh...what happened?” 

The warmth at Rhys’ temple burns a little hotter. A mental image pops into Rhys’ aching head, of Angel settling closer, like she’s actually here, in the metaphorical flesh. _“You were in an accident,”_ she replies softly. Gently. Rhys’ mind-palace-Angel-figure-thing refuses to meet his eyes. _“What can you remember?”_

What _can_ Rhys remember? There was Lilith, giving him the mission, and there was that cliff he’d been forced to scale, and the too-small vent that he was nearly trapped in...then there was the terminal, with that tiny, discreet little harddrive that could change the course of the war just _sitting_ there. And then there was-

There was-

The EXPLoader. 

Rhys remembers that bit now. How he’d thrown his arms up to shield his face. Stumbled back and hit his spine on the corner of a gutted computer terminal. A blinding light. A bursting pain. Red, all over the floor. The harddrive, sitting pretty in his palm a few feet away. His hand, which was red and bloody and still in the sleeve of his leather jacket, all the way up to the shoulder pads. His arm, laying in a growing pool of viscous red blood. The shredded tissue and snapped bone barely visible in that burbling fountain of gore. His arm, which was laying a good few feet…

...away from his body. 

Rhys heaves himself to the side of the bed and vomits on the floor. 

He reels back, bile dripping from his bitten raw lips, throat burning, and wipes his mouth on his hospital gown. Gross. God, _gross._ Every nerve ending, braincell, and muscle in his whole body seem to be revolting and convulsing all at the same time. Somewhere in the distance he thinks he can hear Angel, begging him to snap out of it, but Rhys is too focused on what he’s just uncovered after pulling aside his yellow hospital robe.

There’s nothing. 

Well, that’s not entirely true. There are bandages. Lots of them. Bandages, and a clean, neatly wrapped stump where his shoulder used to connect to his arm. His arm that’s just...gone. Funny, how despite the fact Rhys is staring right at the empty space his arm once was, he can still feel its weight at his side. If he focuses hard enough he swears he can move his fingers. And yet there’s not actually anything there, just empty air and a faint echo of what once was. “Oh, fuck me,” Rhys manages to say, and immediately regrets as a strong taste of stomach bile rises into his mouth again. Angel makes a noise Rhys interprets as a noise of sympathy, but given that he’s hovering between conscious and unconscious while simultaneously forcing down another wave of puke, it could just as easily be a noise of disgust. _“I’m getting you a doctor,”_ she informs him matter-of-factly, and the warmth at Rhys’ neural port disappears. He’s left alone again, in this oversaturated room that stinks of chemicals and stomach acid, with a mangled right side and only one working eye. He lets out a pathetic mewl of discomfort and sinks back into the white sheets. There’s no comfort in them now; they feel stiff and cold against his feverish skin, pooling around his wrist and ankles in similar fashion to shackles keeping him prisoner. A comparison which, if the realization dawning on Rhys is any indication, is not an unfair one to make. 

Four feet to his left side there’s a small rectangular remote nested in a charging pad atop the bedside table. It catches Rhys’ eye as he rolls onto his side. For a moment he assumes it’s probably a help button, in case he fell off the bed or died or something, but then he sees the large, red square with _PRESS FOR ASSISTANCE_ stamped across it in giant white block letters stuck to the railing of his bed and reconsiders. He reaches over, ignoring the twinge of pain that shoots through his upper body at the awkward movement, and yanks the remote from its cradle. There’s a selection of meaningless buttons, from temperature control to bed elevation, and Rhys considers chucking it back at the table, or into a wall, just to be destructive, and is actually winding up to do so when two words jump out at him, pale yellow against the dark grey. _Window Control,_ they read.

Rhys glances around at his four-cornered, five-star hospital room. No windows. He’s about to chalk it up to “Wrong room, wrong remote” when, inexplicably, his eyes settle on the dull metal bulkhead that makes up the entire left wall. Moving without any real thought, Rhys lifts the remote and presses down the flat _Window Control_ button. For a second, nothing happens. Then, with a great, loud series of resounding thuds and the squeaking of metal on metal, the bulkhead opens, splitting in two across the horizontal axis and slowly retreating into the ceiling and floor, respectively. They slot into place with a final _chk-thud_ powerful enough to shake the room, and Rhys can finally take a look at what lies beyond the two inch thick glass. 

The remote falls from his limp hand.

Outside his tiny hospital room, the endless sprawl of space unfolds. Millions of stars and planets twinkle in their spiraling galaxies. And sat front and center is the eyesore of the galaxy - Pandora itself, in all its slag-scarred glory. 

There's only one place in the whole universe you could find a view like this. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lmao I just realized it's been EXACTLY a month since I posted chapter 1, how's that for timing. 
> 
> deadass had no idea im just dumb n procrastinate a lot ok
> 
> Tune in next time for: Angel carries the braincell. Jack is an idiot. Rhys just wants to go home.


	3. You Would Pray For Him

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fiona and Vaughn get some devastating news. The Vault Hunters host a funeral. Angel reflects on her situation, and Rhys attempts an escape.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: while writing this, I got into an HOUR LONG RESEARCH SESSION/DISCUSSION with my best friend about how time would work on other planets. It was draining. 
> 
> And by the end of it I just decided to avoid my problem. 
> 
> So if any of you ever wonder why I take so damn long to update. 
> 
> I am sorry. 
> 
> I am probably researching the mating process of raccoons or some shit because in my brain I went "yes that is something my readers will want to know".

Pandora. 

What a dump. 

Look, Fiona’s lived on this planet for twenty-nine years. She can say things like that. And she’s not wrong, nor would anybody else who lived on the planet and had enough of a brain to form a coherent opinion disagree with her. It’s common knowledge that Pandora, in general, is a complete dump. She knows it, the Crimson Raiders know it, _Hyperion_ knows it. And yet, in spite of Pandora being the universe’s outhouse, there are people here who think it’s worth fighting for. Worth _dying_ for, even. Fiona can understand it, to a point. Growing up here has exposed her to the good, the bad, and the hideously scarring, the latter of which occurring decidedly more often than the former, but those moments of true, selfless good in the world? Infinitesimal as they may be, it’s those tiny moments that permit Pandora that little bit of redemption. 

Plus, the view of Elpis is _great._

Helios sort of ruins it, like it ruins everything else, but it’s been there so long she almost can’t remember what Elpis looked like without it. She was what, nineteen when construction started? Twenty? Of course, when it was originally constructed, nobody had known what it would eventually bring to Pandora. When Hyperion’s old CEO had rolled up some ten years ago and started ordering a huge ass space station to be built in the lunar distance between Pandora and Elpis, everyone on planet and moon had gone “Yep, same shit as always,” and carried on with their day. Fast forward a decade, old CEO is dead, new one is a _complete_ psychopath, Hyperion rules Pandora with an iron grip, and Fiona is somehow part of a rebellion. 

If only Felix could see her now. 

Fiona takes an especially aggressive bite of stew. They’re camped out in the mountains, having taken a detour on what was supposed to be a simple locate-and-retrieve patrol. In truth, it’s been anything _but_ simple. Their comms completely fucked off mid-afternoon, leaving them all effectively cut off from HQ, which was especially great since they’ve been gone for a full day with no way of telling their friends “Hey, we’re not dead”, which was just _great_ , because Vaughn took a bullet to the shoulder during a firefight, an injury that wasn’t fatal but certainly the last thing this shitshow of a patrol needed. Perhaps the most shocking of all was that Axton could cook something other than instant noodles. 

Fiona’s leaning against the wall of their shelter for the night - an alcove in the rock that can only loosely be described as a cave -, half zoned out as she eats the surprisingly appetizing mystery meat stew Axton had thrown together when their rations had proven insufficient for their extended patrol. It’s better not to think about what goes into their food on Pandora. Most of the time you really don’t want to hear it, anyways. But hey, she hasn’t died of food poisoning yet, so there’s that. Whatever Axton’s concocted is rich and earthy, and Fiona traps her spoon between her teeth as she settles in against the canvas duffels recovered from today’s patrol. Since their retrieval that morning a considerable number of charred bullet holes have appeared in the fabric, courtesy of Pandora’s endless supply of bandits who like stealing stuff for the sake of stealing stuff. It’s not like Fiona blames them, given her past as a con artist/general nuisance to anybody even slightly more well off than she. It’s just a little frustrating to be on the receiving end. Karma, she decides. Retribution for all her years of fucking people over. 

In the end it didn’t matter, because the cargo was safe and the bandits who tried to steal it either turned tail when Axton and Salvador showed face, or were now laying in a sand dune, freshly perforated. Was the cargo worth all that trouble? Debatable. Sure felt good to snatch it from Hyperion’s grubby fingers, though. What Lilith wanted with Loader Bot parts and Hyperion armour was a mystery, but one for the future. The armour Fiona understood - infiltration was big these days, and the old “dress in Hyperion colours at a Quick-Change station” ploy had ceased its effectiveness months ago. Spare bits of Loader Bots, on the other hand? No idea. Scare tactic, maybe. Put them on pikes like bandits did with heads. Not sure what that would accomplish, what with the parts being from mass produced robots that had no emotions or sentimental value to themselves or others, but Fiona wasn’t one to care all that much. If she had it her way, she would still be out on the road. 

The whole “resistance” thing never really suited her. Years ago, before the boys had even stepped foot on Pandora, Roland’s _Join the Crimson Raiders_ propaganda posters had started cropping up from time to time, preaching hate against Hyperion and Handsome Jack from the get go. At the time Fiona really didn’t give a shit, because all she cared about was her sister and herself, and making sure they had a roof over their heads and food to eat. If somebody had told her back then she’d be running errands for the Crimson Raiders, she would have laughed in their face. And then probably pick pocketed them.

Really, the only reason Fiona’s here at all is because of Sasha. And the only reason _Sasha_ was a part of it was because two years ago she’d gotten shot in the stomach and Sanctuary was the only place that helped her. They’d stayed to let her recover, and then Sasha felt bad for not having anything to give in return, so they stayed longer to do a couple jobs for the doctor that saved her, which turned into doing jobs for the mechanic, and then Roland himself, and, well, look where they are now. Sitting around a campfire under a rock while Helios stared balefully down at Pandora’s craggy surface, listening to Salvador regale them all with tales of a particularly lively shootout he had been part of. (Apparently, there was singing.) 

It’s not what most people would call perfect. But it’s what Fiona’s got. 

***

Fast travelling was only fun the first time. 

There was something a little disappointing in that revelation. Fiona had secretly hoped it would be fun _all_ the time, but now it just makes her downright nauseous. “You alright?” Vaughn, bless his soul, actually sets down his makeshift crutch to help steady Fiona against the wall she’s braced herself on. His hand on Fiona’s back is a familiar anchor, pulling her back to stand on steady ground. 

“I’ll let you know when the world stops spinning,” Fiona grunts. Her eyes are squeezed shut, fending off the painful whirlpool of sounds and colours pulsing in front of her eyes in some messed up hypnosis show. Vaughn rubs soothing circles between her shoulder blades in an effort to calm her upturned stomach. “Uff,” she pants, waving him away and scrubbing her own hand over her unpleasantly clammy forehead. “Whew. Okay. Nope, still hate it. I hate it. Hate the whole thing.”

Vaughn pats her on the back with a sympathetic shrug. He seems to realize his mistake the second he does so; Fiona can practically see the muscles of his bandaged shoulder seize up in pain and Vaughn’s face twists into a lovely imitation of someone slamming their finger in an Outrunner’s door, hand flying up to grasp at his wound. “ _Ow,_ ” he squeaks. “ _Ohmygod_ **_ow_ ** _._ ”

Fiona bites back a witty remark regarding Vaughn’s pain tolerance; that can wait until after he can move without bleeding through his bandages. A sizable circle of red is leaching through the sandy white cloth wrapped tight around his shoulder and chest. “Damn it,” Vaughn curses. “Must’ve torn it open again.I’ll - ow - meet you at home, ok?”

Fiona dumps her duffel on the ground. “Absolutely not,” she says flatly, waving over Axton from where he’s struggling to find his key to HQ in his pockets. “Could you take my bag while I take this dumbass-” She nudges Vaughn for emphasis, “-to Zed? I don’t want him passing out in the courtyard. Again.”

Axton doesn’t respond right away; he’s found his key, apparently, but dropped it on the ground and is currently stooped over, trying to pick up the tiny metal key while balancing his bag on one shoulder. “Axton,” Fiona says, a little more insistent as Vaughn leans into her a little heavier. 

“Wha-? Oh, shit, yeah, don’t worry.” Axton finally gets his key, and stands up with a rather self-satisfied grin. “I gotcha. You go on, get some fresh bandages on that thing ‘fore it starts to rot.” He shoots Fiona a wink, and laughs when she rolls her eyes. 

“Oh great,” Vaughn says weakly. “Now I’m thinking about _that._ ”

Sanctuary is far from being a normal city. “Normal” on Pandora is more a relative term, depending on context or location, and in most places that could be considered a city, “normal” means a complete free-for-all, where everything goes and any rules that might apply one day probably won’t the next. Sanctuary, and in turn the Crimson Raiders, pride themselves on their success in turning at least one settlement into a sort-of-sane environment. “Normal” in Sanctuary is a subdued, despondent fog hanging heavy over the settlers, most of whom are refugees from towns trampled in Hyperion’s warpath. “Normal” is soft conversations in doorways, drunks at Moxxi’s bar drinking to forget the reason they’re there, soldiers clad in beat-up armour exchanging tips on how to not get killed out in the unforgiving wasteland that is Pandora. Everything’s still fucked up here, but it’s a kind of fucked up one can only find in Sanctuary. 

Which is why, when Fiona steps out of Pierce Station with her injured friend at her hip, the noticeably different air of unease that’s settled over the townsfolk sets off every warning bell she’s got. 

People are muttering as she passes by. There aren’t many out; the man who runs the _This Just In!_ stand is leaning, bored, on his counter, there’s a couple sitting together on a bench beside the obelisk, and five or six Crimson Raider soldiers are clustered near the entrance to HQ, but other than that the usually populated streets are barren. Fiona feels her hair stand on end as she crosses town square. What had happened while she was away? Her concern seems to be shared with Vaughn, who glances at her out of the corner of his eye, bushy eyebrows knit tight, mouth drawn into a grim line. “Not just me, right?” He speaks barely loud enough for Fiona to hear. She adjusts her grip on his waist, drawing him closer to her so they can speak candidly without drawing attention. 

“What, the freakishly quiet morning? Yeah, not just you. The hell is going on?” Fiona glances over at the Raiders by the door, who, upon catching her eye, pointedly look the other way. Okay, seriously. What the hell. She’s intimidating, sure, but these people know her, and not in the “Hey, there’s the girl I saw stab Crazy Legs Murray outside the trading post” way. This is Sanctuary, not Hollow Point. 

“Gotta be bad news,” Vaughn says. He kicks a stone across the courtyard. Watches it skid to a stop by the monument, teeter precariously on the edge, and then disappear. Fiona rolls her eyes. 

“Of course it’s bad news.” The _duh_ goes unspoken. “I’m not seeing anybody throwing a party here. Maybe one of the other missions went awry or something?” 

Vaughn, if possible, pales even more. Fiona subtly quickens their pace before he blacks out from blood loss. “Rhys was on a mission today,” he says weakly. “He messaged me just before our comms went offline. Said it was dangerous.”

Something cold washes over Fiona. The very real fear of losing a friend to this war is thankfully one that has yet to come to fruition, and Fiona still isn’t quite sure how she would deal if any one of her friends, be it her original four or one of the Vault Hunters, failed to come back home. “No,” she says firmly, “Rhys knows what he’s doing. He’s probably fine.”

Vaughn doesn’t answer. 

Huddled in an unassuming, crumbling building that nearly collapsed when Sanctuary took flight, Dr. Zed’s clinic is exactly what one would expect from a backwater medical clinic. Walking in, there’s too much blood on the walls and floor to even be close to being considered sanitary, and Fiona’s no expert but she’s pretty sure leaving a body propped up in a lawn chair isn’t ethical or hygienic. It’s also the only place in Sanctuary where hearing blood curdling screams coming from behind the metal door isn’t cause for alarm. For a medical establishment, the chances of walking out with a new disease are considerably higher than getting your original ailment treated. Still, on a planet without proper healthcare, having somebody who’s enthusiastic about sticking people with needles and digging bullets out of their arms without killing them is pretty much a luxury. (Fiona still prefers to do her own sutures, though. At least she knows her needles have been sterilized.) 

Vaughn is quiet as Zed meticulously stitches his wound shut. His face is white and there’s a dribble of blood running down his lip from where he bit down hard enough to break skin; these next few days aren’t going to be pretty, but he’ll live. Zed finishes with a flourish of his needle and a warning to not do anything that could tear the stitches; then he sends Vaughn on his way with a healing hypo for the road and a literal doctor’s note excusing him from any patrols or tasks that require physical labor. (Apparently the note became a staple of Zed’s pettiness after Lilith told him the only way she would take medical leave from active duty was if she had a doctor’s note, and he responded by making sure every single person he treated walked out with a doctor’s note.) 

Vaughn’s note reads, in Zed’s godawful penmanship, 

_Got a fucked up shoulder._

This war leaves everyone with a grim sense of humour.

The note gets tucked into a pocket. It’ll get added to The Wall back at their apartment. 

Getting back across this courtyard is considerably easier this time around, without Vaughn hanging off Fiona’s shoulder, seconds away from passing out. His gait isn’t as confident as usual, given the soreness of his wound, but there’s colour in his cheeks again and frankly, that was as good a sign as Fiona could hope for. Just to be safe, though, Fiona held onto the Rejuvenator! kit in the off chance Vaughn suddenly _did_ pass out. Crushing their already limited provision of medical supplies under a 5’0” deadweight would not be taken lightly by, well, anyone. Except Handsome Jack. (And he doesn’t count.) 

Opening the door to their shitty, one-bedroom, one-bathroom flat has never been more relieving. A full day since leaving Sanctuary has passed, and Fiona is dead tired. All she wants is to throw on some sweats and a tank top, maybe have a shower, and collapse in her bed for a few millennia. She’s got aching muscles she wasn’t aware even existed, and she’s been working out practically her whole life. 

Figures, then, that the first thing she sees when walking inside is her little sister anxiously pacing up and down the living room floor. 

Sasha’s nails are bitten down to the skin. If her puffy, reddened eyes are any indication, she’s been crying. When Fiona opens the door, Vaughn in tow, her head snaps up, suddenly alert and very, very upset. 

“Fiona!” Sasha’s cry is gut wrenching, it always has been, and hearing her sister’s distress almost immediately vaporizes any self-indulgent thoughts floating about in Fiona’s head. Her arms open near-automatically as Sasha sprints to her, burying her head in Fiona’s chest. “Hey,” Fiona says softly, all previous worries forgotten in favour of taking care of the _right here, right now,_ AKA her anguished baby sister, whose tears are wet against the fabric of Fiona’s dusty frock coat, and whose hair is soft under her fingers as Fiona gently strokes it. “Hey. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

“No,” Sasha sobs, “I’m not! You’ve been gone all day, I thought you were _dead,_ and then Lilith-” Her voice breaks. Dissolves into another wave of wet, choked sobbing. “Lilith,” Sasha repeats, drawing back to clear her throat. Her hands maintain their vice-like hold on the lapels of Fiona’s coat. “Lilith showed up earlier today. She said...said that there’d been a complication on a mission, and…”

Vaughn’s at Sasha’s side now, his own injury apparently forgotten too as he encircles both girls in his arms. There’s a tightness around his eyes that betrays his fear; somehow he keeps it together, if not for himself than for Sasha and Fiona. “And?” Fiona urges. Her stomach is twisting itself into a million tiny knots. “Oh, gods,” Sasha manages, “It’s Rhys.” With that, Sasha falls, a breathless wail tearing itself from her already tender throat, her hands twisting and clawing at her sister’s lapels. Her body shudders as sob after sob wracks through her, tears flowing freely down her face in an unbroken stream. 

Something crashes down over Fiona. “What about Rhys,” she hears herself say. Like she’s listening to a recording. Or watching the scene unfold from above. “Sash, what’s happened to Rhys?”

She knows the answer before Sasha even says it. She can feel it, in the sickness writhing in her belly like piranhas in a feeding frenzy, in the way her blood freezes in her veins. She knows, before Sasha speaks again, what’s befallen her best friend. Vaughn’s grime-stained face is struck through with wet stripes; he doesn't need to say anything for Fiona to know he's figured it out too.

Sasha makes a horrible gasping noise as she chokes on her tears. “He’s gone,” Sasha whispers. Her voice is shattered. “Rhys is dead.” 

***

Lilith tells them it was a heroic death. For the three grieving friends, that comes as little comfort. Three days after word of Rhys' demise reaches the beleaguered team, those who knew Rhys best gather outside Scooter’s garage just after dusk to say goodbye. It’s less a funeral, more a gathering of friends sharing stories and drinking to mask their grief. Any proper ceremony is impossible, with Hyperion prowling every square inch of Pandora. 

Fiona tosses back the dregs of whatever alcoholic concoction someone passed her. There’s no taste anymore, just a bitter sting as it goes down and the smell of something fruity. Sasha’s current drink sits untouched between her crossed legs. She stares down at the pink liquid like it’ll somehow give her the answers she’s searching for. What happened to Rhys? How did he die? How will they ever come back from this? All these questions, and the only man who can answer them is the very one everybody is raising a glass in memory of. 

As for Vaughn, well. He sits quietly on the stairs, not drinking, just blankly staring at his calloused hands and the battered photo clenched between them. 

Fiona isn’t sure he’s said a word since they got the news.

Listening to Lilith spout patriotic shit about her dead friend seems sacreligious, somehow. Her eulogy isn’t complete bullshit, Rhys _was_ loyal to the cause, and he _did_ care deeply for his friends. But she talks about him as a soldier, not a friend. Her stories are of Rhys' talent on the field, be it in combat or espionage, or his invaluable knowledge of Hyperion’s inner workings. It’s true he was an asset to the team - a major one, at that - and Fiona isn’t going to complain about how he’s getting the recognition he deserves, she just wishes Lilith focused less on Rhys' usefulness in battle and more on who he really was. She supposes that bit is her job - the words scrawled on the bunched-up paper tucked in her breast pocket are all about her friend’s wild, dumb side. Maybe she’s getting ahead of herself. 

Roland’s speech is much the same as Lilith’s, in terms of paying tribute to a fallen soldier. He laments that he never got the chance to know Rhys, but knows he was a good man. (The use of past tense in regards to Rhys will never, Fiona decides, stop hurting.) Maya actually cries when she reads out her eulogy, and it’s the first one that has Fiona tearing up, too. Of the original Vault Hunters, Maya and Zer0 were the two Rhys got along with best - and the three of them made a damn good team. Maya finishes with a “So long, little bro,” and then it’s Fiona’s turn, and she can’t even remember walking to the front, or taking her paper from her coat, just that she’s suddenly up there in front of the people she’s come to know over the past few years, and only know remembers just how much she hates public speaking. 

She stares down at the words in front of her. 

They don’t feel real. 

_Pandora is unforgiving. Day after day it steals from us all, and now it has stolen someone irreplaceable._

The words don’t sit right in Fiona’s mouth. They’re too stiff, too formal. When she thinks about Rhys, and their misadventures, all that comes to mind is his stupid grin and complete lack of any common sense regarding self-preservation. She examines the piece of paper upon which her words have been scrawled; there’s a tear stain smudging the end of the sentence. Obviously she wasn’t in the best state of mind when she wrote this, not that she is now, because when she opens her mouth the first words out are “My best friend was an idiot.” 

Okay, not exactly what she was going for, but let’s roll with it. 

“I say that,” She continues, “Because every single time we got into trouble, it was either Rhys’ stupid plan that got us into the mess, or an equally stupid plan that got us out. Maybe it was dumb luck. Maybe Rhys was smarter than he let on. But he saved my hide, and my sister’s, too many times to count.”

The rest of her speech comes naturally; she talks about meeting Rhys, when he was fresh-faced and couldn’t even fire a gun properly; and because she knows Rhys would kick her for leaving it out, includes the story of how Sasha and herself tried to con him and Vaughn out of their escape money. There are some chuckles at that; sympathetic “we’ve been there” sentiments that fail to stick. Some stories she deems too personal, too clandestine to share. Others she tells in full detail, letting all the emotions flood out. Fiona doesn’t realize she’s been crying until she’s finished, and a wet droplet splashes across the back of her shaking hand.

Rhys would tease her to high heaven if he saw her now. 

Bastard.

Lilith has raised her glass again. Her hand is intertwined with Maya’s. There is an identical fire lit in their eyes, one Fiona imagines will have Handsome Jack burning in all too soon. Slowly, the Vault Hunters of Sanctuary raise their glasses in solidarity as the two sirens pledge to avenge their fallen siren brother and paint Pandora red with Hyperion blood. 

_Hell hath no fury like two sirens scorned,_ Fiona thinks.

“For Rhys!” Lilith cries. 

_For Rhys,_ Fiona thinks. _I’ll miss you, dumbass._

_I’m sorry._

***

Angel hates lying to them. 

Playing double agent has never been easy. She’s had to learn to accept that, and it’s still hard to do. Her dad used to tell her she had her mother’s heart; right now, Angel wishes she took after her father more - with an empathy level of .5 and no moral dilemma about whether or not she should give a shit about the crowd of mourners down in Sanctuary. 

Sanctuary’s video feed is grainy but it’s enough to make out the faces of the people Angel has grown to know so much about. Lilith and Maya, the two sirens, have spread their wings out as a tribute for their fallen brother - the same person who, just two screens over, is curled up in thin hospital sheets, pumped full of drugs to keep him sedated and submissive. There’s a sick sort of irony in there somewhere. Perhaps the worst sight of all is Vaughn, Rhys’ best friend; he’s gotten up from his seat and Angel has to quickly switch the camera feed to track his meandering path across the settlement. Sanctuary isn’t a big place, but Vaughn is lost in it. 

Angel didn’t need a brain the size of the known universe to know Rhys and Vaughn had known each other all their lives. She didn’t need to have scoured every Hyperion report, file, and camera feed to know they were inseparable. Every graduation, every promotion, every bad breakup and near-engagement they had been at each other’s side. Vaughn had literally sacrificed his dream, the job he’d been working toward since high school, to flee to Pandora with Rhys, something Angel’s not sure even her father would do.

She wonders, watching Vaughn’s aimless path through Sanctuary, what having a loyal friend like that would be like. 

In the camera feed, Vaughn’s shoulders start to shake. Angel watches him, her lips stretched into a thin line, as he falls to his knees, and Angel has never been more thankful the audio on Sanctuary’s surveillance system has been busted for the better part of a year. She’s not sure her heart could take hearing Vaughn cry. 

Angel shuts the camera off before her emotions get the better of her and she does something stupid.

A chime sounds from further past her array of screens and cables. Angel glances at a nearby clock with a frown. Time for her checkup already? Apparently she spent more time browsing Pandora’s camera feeds than she thought. It’s easy enough to do; being stuck in a glorified medical ward all hours of the day doesn’t make room for much entertainment. Sure, she’s got her art, and she’s learning the piano after mastering the guitar, but you can only strum the same cords and draw the same sunrise so many times before it gets old. 

Rising from her seat, Angel’s legs give a twinge of complaint as she unfolds them. Despite her father’s constant offers to buy her a chair like his, complete with the dopamine injectors that honestly just freak Angel out, she much prefers her old blue bean bag. She gives it a kick to move it out of the way as she pads barefoot to the next room, where the Hndl3r-B0t is waiting. The bot, specially designed by Hyperion’s Head of Cybertechnology, arrives every day, three times a day, to check on Angel’s health, both mental and physical, change her IV, and give her her meds. It’s a tall, sleek, white thing, vaguely shaped like a human woman, composed of flat white panels slotted together to form a sort of dress. A cheery smiley face leers back at Angel from under the bot’s fake bangs. 

Angel hates the thing. 

_“And how are we feeling today, Miss Keene?”_ The robot’s voice is sharp and electronic. _“Any heat spells, migraines, or dizzy spells?”_

Angel gives it a thin lipped smile. “No, ma’am,” she says. The bot beeps in satisfaction and Angel can _see_ its gears turning as it loads up the next bout of questions. They appear as little blue specks of light travelling up to the central processor unit, glowing and pulsing as they go. “No suicidal thoughts, panic attacks, or desire to harm, either,” she tells it before the bot has a chance to speak. The specks fizzle out. 

_“Excellent,”_ says the bot, in its unsettling monotone voice. _“Please extend your [right] arm.”_

Angel holds out the aforementioned arm. Her IV is starting to itch again, which is a sign the Eridium inside is running low. She watches, blank-faced, as the robot plucks the needle from its port in her hand and replaces it with an identical, but refilled one. The bag, filled with the glowing purple sediment that keeps her alive, goes on the IV stand Angel’s half leaning on. “ _Assessment complete. Submitting results to Handsome Jack. Have a pleasant evening, Miss Keene.”_

Angel shuts the door as soon as the forsaken thing and its creepy face is out of her quarters. 

The new IV drip burns pleasantly hot as Angel pokes through her refrigerator. She’s used to the feeling by now, but the first few minutes after getting the bag changed always make her a little lethargic and in most cases, quite hungry. Her timer for dinner hasn’t gone off yet, but it will in about thirty minutes, so Angel figures she can treat herself to an early meal. She switches the alarm off for today while pulling a plate of steak & mashed Demeter tubers from the shelf. There’s a note stuck to the top. 

_Steak n potatoes - with a special twist_

  * _xoxo your awesome dad_



Angel peels it off and sticks it next to the mural of identical notes taped up on the wall beside her corkboard; a collage of every meal her dad has cooked for her since her relocation to Control Core Angel. If Jack knew she’d kept all of them...Angel shudders to think. He’d never let her hear the end of it. 

Jack doesn’t visit much anymore. He used to, in the beginning, every few days, under the guise of making sure everything was functional and definitely not to carry Angel to bed when she fell asleep at her monitors or hold her close when the pain got to be too much. Angel sort of misses when he’d show up in the late evening, maskless, holding a bag of their favourite pizza from Helios’ best pizza joint. He’d ruffle her hair as she got plates, and they’d sit in front of the television to eat, pretending, for a moment, that they were back on Talos, before Jack was scarred and before Angel’s accident. Try as they might, though, Jack, as always, chose to ignore his problems rather than face them. Little by little, his visits became shorter, less frequent. He’d be preoccupied with his ECHOtablet, and would leave early because so-and-so working in such-and-such just had a breakthrough on something-probably-gun-related. Now, their communications are limited to texting or video chat, and, if Birdie can get it working properly, Cybertech’s Holo-program. 

Such is life. Angel’s learned to never get comfortable, because everything ends eventually. 

Doesn’t mean it’s stopped hurting so goddamn much.

Sinking back into the bean bag, Angel sets her warm plate in her lap and starts flicking through channels, trying to find something half-decent to poke her nose into. Pandora’s always a safe bet for entertainment. Sure, she could always just find a show to watch on the _actual_ television, but where’s the fun in that? Plus, no bad acting, and a lower chance of getting some weird commercial of her dad, shirtless, with a gun. (Sometimes it’s Tim, but that doesn’t make it any better.) And it’s sort of her job to keep tabs on Sanctuary. She glances at one of the screens hanging from the ceiling; the one always tuned to cycle through Sanctuary’s cameras. Everybody is still drinking. No changes there, then. 

Angel swivels back around in her chair and promptly sticks her elbow right in the mashed potatoes.

Naturally. 

“Darn,” she sighs, and reaches for a box of tissue sitting atop a stack of files Jack probably wanted her to go through. She’s pulling one from the box when, out of the corner of her eye, she happens to glance at the camera installed in Rhys’ hospital room. Angel freezes halfway to the tissue box. In the ten minutes since she last checked, Rhys is not only sitting up, but fully alert, and, to Angel’s horror, carefully sliding the IV needle out from under his skin. 

“Oh, _fuck,_ ” curses Angel. The commlink to Jack’s personal phone is already pinging; perks of being connected to every device on the space station. 

The phone rings.  
  


And rings. 

And _rings._

Rhys continues to glance carefully around his room, gaze lingering on the shut door. Angel watches him, panic rising every second Jack fails to pick up. By the time he finally picks up, Angel has blown out the monitors above and behind her out of stress. “ _Baby,_ ” he says, surprised. “ _What’s the w-_ “

“We’ve got a big problem down in Cyber,” Angel interrupts. “Concerning our one-armed friend.”

***

  
  


There’s a medtech who enters the hospital room every day at the same time. 

She’s only there for a few minutes, long enough to check Rhys' vitals and inject more of the glowing purple liquid into his IV, and then she’s gone again. Five minutes is a limited time window, but Rhys only needs two. The medtech has a high-priority access card belonging to the Cybernetics and Biotechnology department - the same area that, four years ago, Rhys became well acquainted with during the installation of his ECHOeye. He could walk around this place blind, and that isn’t an exaggeration, because his ECHOeye surgery left him blind for a week. So, provided he is, in fact, in the Cybertech division, that means that the closest escape pods are three floors below. The medtech comes three times a day - once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once at night, when all the lights are turning off in the halls. If Rhys can snag her ID card and incapacitate her before she sounds an alarm, getting to the pods should be doable. People might look at him weird, but Rhys is hoping seeing a one armed, slightly deranged looking man wandering the halls in a hospital gown, they’ll steer clear. 

A lot of faith is going into Hyperion’s unspoken “Don’t question it” policy. 

The likelihood of Rhys dying during this stupid escape plan is somewhere in the ninety percent range.

Death is better than being trapped on Helios, anyways. 

At precisely 9:15, a soft swish of pneumatic tracks tells Rhys the medtech is right on schedule. Gingerly, he pinches the IV tube he removed from his arm a few minutes earlier. It took him an uncomfortable amount of time to convince himself to pull it out; whatever sedative is in there, it’s strong, highly addictive stuff. He’s got his suspicions as to what it is, and he can’t say he likes them. 

The medtech’s white heels clack against the cold marbled floor. Rhys can’t see anything above her waist; his good eye is only half open, feigning sleep, or at the very least a state of drug-induced lethargy. Tubes shift at his side as the woman inserts a needle into the IV drip. It gives a hiss as the new dose is accepted, and Rhys instinctively tenses up. Through his blurred vision he can only half-make out the vague purple line slowly trickling down to the needle pinched tightly in his grip. A slight shock of warmth hits his fingers when the fluid hits the blockage. A little longer, and he’ll be ready. The medtech has apparently noticed the lack of a change in vitals, and turns her back from the bed to adjust the flow settings. _One,_ Rhys counts. He opens his good eye. _Two._ The medtech turns back around. _Three._ Her eyes meet Rhys’, and before she can open her mouth, he lunges, plunging the pressurized needle deep into her neck. 

The effect is near instantaneous. 

Rhys was right about how strong the shit they’ve been pumping him full of is. 

The nurse staggers backwards, clawing at her neck with nails much too long to be working in the medical field. Her mouth flaps open and closed like a beached fish, words unable to form properly as the drug takes hold. Rhys can see it spreading through her veins, a wonderful, pulsing purple light, burning through her system with all the efficiency of a forest fire in a drought. Her back hits one of the machines, causing her to stumble, and she hits the ground just as a tendril of purple poison reaches her head. Her eyes are rolling back in her head and she’s audibly struggling to breathe as more and more of the purple fluid is pumped into her system. Rhys, indifferent, slips out of the bed and crouches down in front of her. “Sorry,” he says quietly, snapping the ID from its cheery, cartoon-flower lanyard. “But I need this.” 

There’s a moment, just then, where she tries to reach out for him, fingers barely brushing his bare arm. He watches through a narrowed eye as her arm goes limp. She gasps one last time, and then her eyes go dark.

Rhys stands up. 

She probably had a family waiting for her, somewhere.

Then again, so does he. 

As an afterthought, he pulls her lab coat from her lifeless body and painstakingly pulls it over his own. A very pungent scent of dead flowers comes with it. The coat is a little tight in the waist, but works to obscure the hospital gown. Hopefully it will spare him some glances, in case the “Don’t question it” policy fails. His right sleeve flaps around, empty, providing Rhys with a lovely reminder of what Hyperion has, once again, stolen from him. 

No alarms sound when he passes through the sliding door leading to his hospital room. Rhys is relieved, of course, although the thought that there may be alarms only just occurred to him. Oops. Well, not a problem now, evidently. There isn’t a horde of security officers sprinting top speed down the hallway at him. There isn’t anyone, actually. The hall is completely silent, and exactly as Rhys remembers. Cold, dark, decorated with some potted plants and a couple fish tanks as if they’ll somehow make the place feel less dead. He glances up and down the lengthy hallway, at the rows of closed doors identical to his own. Blocky white letters written on the steel walls confirm that his assumption was right - this is the Cybertech division. The medical part of it, at least. There’s been some renovations since the last time he was here, which he notes as he sprints down the empty corridor. Things are a little more...posh. Everything had been lifeless and utilitarian when Rhys had gotten his ECHO implants done. That included the people. 

Rhys rounds a corner, following a sign pointing to the elevators. _Home stretch,_ he thinks. _Home stretch. A little further, a little longer, and you can see Vaughn and Fiona and Sash-_

There’s a soft _tap_ from somewhere behind Rhys, and he turns around just quick enough to catch a silhouette step out into the darkened hall. He barely has enough time to realize what’s happening before all the muscles in his body seize and he drops, hitting the floor with a nauseating _thwack._ Every molecule in his body seems to be on fire; he tries to scream, but his mouth is wired shut, it _must_ be, because he can’t open it, he can’t _move,_ there’s just him and this horrible, horrible pain like lightning striking him over and over and over again. 

Something hot and wet is beginning to cloud his vision. The salty taste of tears breaks across his tongue as a drop rolls down his cheek. 

The seizing doesn’t stop. Another onslaught begins to surge, and this time? This time Rhys _screams._ It hurts just opening his mouth, like his face is tearing itself open, and he’s a sobbing mess by the time his throat closes again and he gags on his own tongue. 

Finally, the torture stops. His muscles relax. Not enough to permit movement, but enough that he can feel something other than pain. The tile is cool against his tear-soaked skin. His breath comes in ragged gasps as he watches the reflection of his tormenter grow closer on the reflective floor. Beaten sneakers come to a halt a few feet away from Rhys’ face. A beat. Then the man crouches down, and a strong hand is forcing Rhys to look up into a pair of eyes that starred in every Pre-Pandora wet dream and every Post-Pandora nightmare. 

“Ah, tut tut ta,” Handsome Jack scolds, “Bad doggy. Do I need to get you a leash to match that pretty little collar of yours?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah no seriously that whole pressurised needle thing? visited so many medical advice websites. probably looked like a serial killer in some of my questions. nope. just a dumbass lesbian who overthinks everything she writes. 
> 
> In other news, Jack and Rhys finally meet face to face! Sort of. Rhys is a little out of it. He'll be fine. Probably.
> 
> Quick note regarding the lore in this story - anyone who read the previous chapter when it first came out and then reread it a couple weeks ago might have noticed Angel's age changed; in the original chapter she stated herself as being 19, but I went in and changed it to 21. This is due to the timeline in this fic - personally, I headcanon Angel to be 19 during the events of BL2, which puts her around 14-15 in BL1, which, if Childhood's End is considered, makes sense. However, this fic fucks w the timeline a little. It takes place in a universe where the Pandora/Hyperion war has been ongoing for a while. I'll go more into detail in later chapters, but I just wanted to clear that up if anybody was confused. 
> 
> Til next time, 
> 
> \- Cas


	4. We Both Knew This Day Was Coming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rhys' escape plan doesn't go according to, well, plan. Jack reflects on a past relationship. Angel struggles with guilt regarding her place in the war, and her relationship with Rhys. An argument in Sanctuary leads to an unfortunate turn of events.

As deaths go, Rhys will admit this might be one of the worst ways to die. 

Years ago, before Pandora had been more than a view to wake up to each morning, Rhys had imagined his death one of two ways - murdered by a coworker, or dying peacefully of old age in a mansion earned by years of hard work and corporate curb-stomping. Following the Helios Incident, he’d accepted that however he was going to die, it was going to be bloody, gritty, and probably the result of a deranged bandit hoping to add another tally to a kill list.

This fell somewhere between the two, and Rhys can’t say he’s overly thrilled with the compromise.

Whatever the hell Jack shocked him with must have been some sort of paralytic agent, because it’s been a few minutes now and there still isn’t any feeling returning to Rhys’ body, except for the unpleasant  _ cold-hot-cold  _ buzz slowly creeping from his neck downward. The ground, at least, provides some relief from the feverish burn that ebbs and flows in intensity, the tile smooth and cool against his bare skin. It does nothing to stave off the sweat pricking along his spine and sticking the thin material of his hospital gown to his back, but it feels nice on his face and honestly, right now that’s enough. 

Now that he thinks about it, Rhys really should have seen this coming. No way would Handsome Jack leave any prisoner alone with poor security, let alone one of Rhys’ high profile.  One nurse every few hours? No guards stationed outside? Not even a pair of handcuffs keeping him chained to the bed? Please. Rhys curses himself for not seeing this coming miles away - of  _ course  _ Jack would have some fucked up plan to get him to stay put. A fail safe, just in case Rhys was crazy enough to try and escape. 

_ Do I need to get you a leash to match that pretty little collar of yours?  _

Jack’s patronizing taunt rings in Rhys’ ears. Whether or not he’d assumed Rhys had figured it out, the son of a bitch wanted to show off how he’d bested Rhys. Again. The thin little strip embedded in the collar of his gown must be some sort of taser device, one strong enough to take a grown man to the floor. It’s the only thing that makes sense, given how all the muscles in his neck have seized up and everything from the collar downwards still aches. 

“Gotta say, kiddo, I’m almost impressed.” Jack’s voice is annoyingly casual for somebody seconds away from committing murder. “I mean, that thing you did with the needle! A-friggin’-plus! Watched the whole thing on cams and  _ man,  _ you just - Bam! No hesitation! ‘Course, uh, whole thing went tits-up the second you stepped outside, but still, y’know. Respect. And a gold star for effort.” 

“Fuck you,” Rhys spits, in what he hopes is a snarl, because those two words take all his remaining energy to force out and it would be a little embarrassing if his attempt at standing up for himself came out sounded like a sneeze. He watches, apprehensive, as Jack’s beat-up sneakers still.  _ Well,  _ he thinks derisively,  _ there have been worse last words, I guess.  _ Rhys steels himself for the inevitable kick to the throat, or bullet to the head, or whatever horrific end Jack has in store, wondering, not for the first time, if anything exists after death. What he is not expecting is to hear Jack snort, then laugh, not an unkind or cold one, but a laugh that a few years ago would have had Rhys’ heart skip a beat. “Oh-ho-ho! He speaks!” Jack sounds like he’s grinning, but Rhys is too exhausted to look. “Also, seriously? That’s all you got? C’mon, show me some of that Pandoran  _ fire  _ I’ve heard so much about!” 

Partially out of spite, Rhys says nothing. Jack always hated that, when his threats - sorry,  _ encouragements,  _ as he’d put it - didn’t land. He’d get frustrated, poke and prod at the issue like somehow being even more irritating would fix it, and then yes, eventually, blow a hole through the skull of whoever was pissing him off. Therefore, if Rhys is going to die here anyways, why not have some fun with it? 

...Okay, maybe  _ fun  _ isn’t the right word, since he’s pretty miserable right now. Satisfaction, maybe? A sense of false accomplishment? 

Alright, seriously, what the hell is Jack doing. Anyone else would be dead four times over by now. Rhys waits for the click of a loaded gun, something,  _ anything  _ that signifies this torture is going to come to an end, even just a shuffle of Jack’s dad shoes to indicate he’s still on the murder path. Except Jack has fallen silent, and trying to imagine what’s going through his head right now is somehow more excruciating than if Rhys were to get shot.

Neither of them end up breaking the silence. Following a diligent tapping on what Rhys can only assume to be Jack’s gold-plated, ridiculously expensive ECHOtab, five new sets of footsteps echo through the quiet lobby. Directionally, Rhys thinks he can place them coming from the elevators he’d been sprinting to, if his mental map of the area was at all accurate. Reinforcements. Figures. There’s no mistaking the uniform footfalls of Hyperion’s security officers. The realization of what this implicates dawns on Rhys just as two pairs of strong, armoured hands take hold of his shoulders - what’s left of his right one shrieks in pain, and Rhys nearly does too - and wrench him to his knees. Even though Jack has his gun drawn, he isn’t going to kill him here; that would be too merciful, and Handsome Jack doesn’t do mercy. The cold steel of Jack’s gun forces its way under Rhys’ chin, tilting it up so he has no other choice but to look his captor in the eye. 

Jack’s eyes are so, so cold, and there is nothing but icy amusement in their depths as he considers the man before him. 

He still holds himself with that air of casual superiority. It’s infuriating, really, the effect he has on people; this inexplicable ability to turn heads and silence voices without so much as a gesture or a word. He stands with all the confidence of a man all too cognizant of the fear he inspires, and is quite secure in it, too. Rhys used to live in awe of that confidence. Now he shrinks away in the shadow it casts. 

He had known, all those years ago, that facing Jack again was inevitable. Just as the sun rose and set over Pandora’s hills, one day Rhys would be staring down Handsome Jack again, and there was nothing, absolutely  _ nothing  _ he could do to prevent it. Joining the Crimson Raiders had seemed like the perfect storm - when that dreaded, inescapable meeting finally came round, he’d have a small army of people willing to fight for him standing at his side. How petty and selfish that felt now. This was always how it was going to end - no fanfare, no great battle. Just Rhys, and Jack, and the millions of unspoken words that hung, stagnant, in the tense air that enveloped them. It’s why he knows, now, that this isn’t where he dies. It’s too impersonal. There’s no  _ flair  _ to it. His death wouldn’t be memorable enough. It wouldn’t make a good tale. And Jack always needed more of those - stories of his so-called  _ heroics _ . 

“You know,” Jack muses, almost as if he’s read Rhys’ mind, “I did consider killing you here. Just  _ bang,  _ to the head, quick ‘n easy, leave someone else to scrape your brains off the floor. Wouldn’t have to worry about you running amok again. Fuckin’ more things up. We both know you deserve it, don’t we? Yeah. But then I thought, hey, why not keep him around for a bit? After all,” he grins, too wide, all teeth and no mirth, “We’ve still got tomorrow, right, kitten?”

Rhys’ entire body goes cold.

_ Tomorrow. I promise we can have tomorrow. _

He hears the words echo somewhere in the back of his mind. Looking at Jack, he half-wonders if he hears them, too. But Jack’s face is unreadable, and Rhys is left without answers. If he’s waiting for something, an explanation, maybe, even a witty comeback, Rhys is too shaken to provide one. And even if he could, what would he say?  _ I’m sorry _ ? _ Forgive me _ ?  _ Please, god, let me live _ ? 

Before he can figure out what the hell Jack wants from him, whatever moment transpired between them passes as quickly and as jarringly as it had come.

“Take him back to his room,” he hears Jack order as he comes back to himself. Jack wrenches the gun from out under his chin. “And get some damn cuffs on him, people! He escapes again and it’s your scrawny chicken necks on the chopping block, capiche?” 

Hands grapple at Rhys’ shoulders, under his arm, at his neck and waist, pulling him up, up to his feet, keeping him upright despite every muscle in his body begging to collapse again. As he’s drawn to his full height Rhys forces himself to square his jaw and level his gaze with Jack, single brown eye meeting blue and green. 

In the end, as he’s dragged away, Rhys isn’t sure what’s worse - how there was no recognition in Jack’s bitter eyes, or the fact he had wanted there to be. 

***

Finding his daughter’s hologram cross-legged atop Jack’s desk comes as no surprise when Jack finally makes it back up to his office. Her presence can only be an omen of a conversation Jack will have no escape from, as per usual. 

He can imagine, back down in the Control Core, she’s sitting on her own desk, anxiously tweaking the skin of her palms, a nervous habit she picked up from God knows where. She’s fidgety, today, which only spells trouble for Jack. And the Control Core systems, which will no doubt be picking up all sorts of strange readings when Angel paces her way around the entirety of her apartment-slash-birdcage. 

A thought crosses Jack’s mind, as he takes in her comfortably mundane appearance, that this is one of the few times as of late that Jack has seen his daughter look her age. Recently she’s looked decades older than she should be. She’s barely twenty one, but you wouldn’t know it from the bags under her eyes, from the weight she holds so carefully on her shoulders. Angel’s always had an old soul, which came part and parcel with her siren heritage, and even as a child, before Catherine had passed, she’d look at Jack with eyes that had already seen his past, present, and future. And when Cat had died, well…that mile-long stare got worse. 

Today she sits on Jack’s desk wearing a pair of baby blue exercise shorts and an old graphic tee the colour of graphite, looking, for once, like any other young woman her age. 

After the shit Jack has gone through tonight, the sight is almost comforting. 

“Dad,” she exclaims the moment the office doors close behind Jack, rising from her seat with a surprising amount of grace for someone sitting cross-legged on an elevated surface. “How did it go?”

Jack shrugs his jacket from his shoulders. Tosses it to the couch in the library, where he’ll no doubt be crashing for the night. “It went,” he grunts. He needs a drink. Or seven. 

Angel, ever persistent, refuses to take Jack’s attitude as a hint to step off, and follows him on his path to the gold-inlaid mini bar stashed in one corner of his office. “ _ Dad, _ ” she insists, when Jack pours amber-coloured scotch into a crystal tumbler. “Seriously. What happened?”

Jack rolls his eyes. The bottle of scotch  _ clinks  _ against the glass counter as he puts it back down. Jack stares into the amber depths of his glass like they’ll reveal some big secret hidden just out of sight. The glass, stubbornly, remains just a glass, and says nothing. His daughter, on the other hand, inherited his own unyielding stubbornness, and while sure, okay, he’s glad she can hold her own in an argument, there are times that he wishes she’d inherited something else instead. Like right now, because he knows that no matter how hard he tries, even if he gives her the silent treatment and gets shitfaced on top-shelf booze, she’s not going anywhere until he explains what, exactly, happened down in Cybertech. 

“Fuck, Angie,” Jack snaps, “What do you want me to say? We embraced like some fuckin’ tools in a shitty rom com? Nah, I kicked his ass and sent him to his room.” He hopes she doesn’t notice his hands shaking as he tips his glass back to take a drink. The burn of the scotch barely registers against his tongue and throat. “Which, by the way, was probably the best outcome for him. With all the bullshit he’s caused, I shoulda just shot him and called it a goddamn day. Wouldn’t be the first bandit I put down.”

“Dad-“

“He’s a bandit, Angel.” Jack slams what’s left of his scotch back. “He means nothing to me.”

A beat passes where neither of them speak. Jack flexes his fingers around his glass, pointedly ignoring his daughter. “Sure,” Angel finally says, an edge of irritability pricking her voice. “And who is it, exactly, that you’re trying to convince with that? Me? Or you?” She lingers for a moment longer, arms crossed and lips pinched into a thin line, watching her father’s shoulders stiffen at the jab, before she disappears in a short burst of static. Jack stares balefully at the spot where she’d stood, half-wondering if he’s going to be receiving another passive-aggressive email from her linking him to another “therapist” so he can “deal with his trauma” in a “healthy manner”. 

He pours himself another drink. 

_ Don’t get attached.  _ That was his own personal motto, right? There were very few people who Jack actually gave a shit about, thanks to decades of losing the ones he loved and being betrayed by those who stuck around. He’d thought - well, hoped, really - that Rhys might be an exception to that rule. It turned out he was another reason the rule existed in the first place. 

Just like everybody else, Rhys left. 

And then, when this whole thing started, when Angel 

discovered Rhys’ little secret, Jack, like an idiot, had himself convinced that any past feelings regarding Rhys and his godawful sock collection could be forgotten in favour of the fight for Pandora. 

What a load of bullshit that had been. 

He can still remember, give or take some details dampened by alcohol, the night Rhys walked into his life. Or rather, the night Rhys almost clocked him in the face and somehow ended up worming his way into a position at Jack’s side. He’d been this irritable beanpole of a middle manager, dressed in a tacky-yet-sensible suit and bearing the scars of a recent ECHOeye surgery. It’d ultimately been the scars that had kept Rhys from being shot out into space - or so Jack tells himself, because the thought of him being genuinely intrigued that some scrawny fuck nearly punched his lights out and didn’t show any remorse about it is ridiculous, and completely not true. The scars, though…they meant something. 

On Helios, scarring from cybernetic surgeries was worn just as proudly as the cybernetics themselves. Most of the tech was intentional and, often, purely cosmetic, and the scarring was a part of flaunting the augmentations. Jack had seen a lot of impressive surgery scars in all his years of both being CEO and his stints as a part-time vault hunter. The telltale pinstripe scars running up an arm from a cybernetic hand, the puckered, rough scarring of weaponized implants, even the neat, crisscrossed contours from alignment surgeries. Jack had seen them all. Several times. Maybe all the time, considering his day-to-day company. Which was why, ultimately, Rhys’ ocular scars had been so interesting - up until that point, Jack had only ever met one person who bore such scars, and she was one of the toughest bitches he’d ever had the (mis?)fortune of knowing. They’d long since faded, her scars, but back when she  _ did  _ have them, she wore them with pride. Ocular cybernetics had the highest casualty rate of any surgery, and to bear the scars of a successful installation meant the person was strong - and by god, Rhys was. Resilient, resourceful, clever…there had been a time when Jack would have sung his praises over the Helios intercom. A time when Rhys would have been glaring at him from his own desk, just a few feet away at the bottom of the stairs. 

The Rhys from that time was long dead and gone now, and the Rhys that Jack encountered today was a twisted, hardened version of the witty young man who used to shake his head with a smile and an exasperated _ Jack, no,  _ and goddamn if that didn’t hurt like a motherfucker. Today Rhys had looked at him with the eyes of a soldier, one weathered by war and pain and blood. There had been a scar, Jack recalls, that ran from the middle of Rhys’ left cheekbone to the corner of his top lip, one that certainly hadn’t been there three years ago. It was faint, but it was there. Jack can’t help but wonder what happened. If it was a scar given by a bandit who had gotten too close, or if one of Jack’s own men had marred him in such a way. The thought of some mindless lackey carelessly lashing out and hurting Rhys prickles uncomfortably at the back of Jack’s neck, and he reaches again for the bottle of scotch still waiting on the countertop. 

He’d known years ago that falling for his PA could only end in disaster. 

***

The medtech’s body is still in the hospital suite when Rhys is rudely shoved back inside. Apparently even when damaged the machine keeps pumping that foul-smelling purple liquid out, and the medtech’s skin is shot through with bulging purple veins, some of which have burst and are leaking a sour cocktail of purple and red all over the floor. Her eyes, which Rhys can remember being full of terror and silent pleas for her life, have sunken back into her skull. At least, what’s left of them. Most of what used to be her eyes is seeping from empty sockets down her cheeks, greyish-purple in colour and wholly disgusting. 

Rhys thinks he can hear a couple of Jack’s soldiers laughing as the door slides shut behind him. 

Apparently the universe isn’t quite done dishing out a helping of “Fuck you in particular, Rhys”, because the lights are out in the room and do not turn back on. 

In the scant light that had been cast by the lights in the hall, the medtech’s body was just unpleasant. Now, alone in a pitch-dark room, every hollowing cavity, festering raw pustule, and puddle of corpse-slime that the body exudes is painfully on display, being the only things illuminated by what little light is generated from the purple sludge itself and the beeping machines still whirring in the corner. Rhys swallows, his throat feeling particularly dry. The stench is  _ awful  _ \- despite the woman being dead for barely an hour, the air is thick with the unmistakable stink of rot. 

Briefly, it occurs to Rhys he should be more concerned about how quickly the medtech’s corpse is deteriorating; how her flesh is literally sloughing off her bones as though she’s been decomposing for a couple months already. The implication that whatever is pumping through his own veins is the same as what’s turning this lady into soup should definitely be ringing some alarm bells. Maybe it is, but Rhys is too distracted to hear them. He’s cold, now, though whether it’s from a genuine change in temperature or just his body going into shock is up for debate. His back hits the door just hard enough to send spidery slivers of pain through his shredded right shoulder. Rhys winces, annoyed by, but thankful for the pain, because it means he’s alive, and things may be terrible right now but at least he’s still human, in the loosest definition of the phrase. The pain means he hasn’t lost everything. Not yet. 

Rhys slides to the ground. As inviting as the hospital bed is to his aching bones, laying down in it would mean being directly beside the medtech’s disintegrating corpse and sure, Rhys has spent the night in bandit hovels that reek of death and have severed heads strung up as garlands over an overly cheery fire, but with the toxic fumes wafting from a body that is in no way decomposing of any natural means, he’d rather cut his losses and curl up as far away as possible. He tries to make himself comfortable, balling up his stolen lab coat into a makeshift pillow and when that doesn’t work, cramming himself into the corner between door and wall and draping the coat over him like a blanket. It smells of dead flowers. Probably a perfume the medtech wore. Rhys can’t tell if it’s better or worse than the death-stink she’s currently wafting across the small room. 

Back on Pandora in aforementioned bandit hovels, the only way Rhys would be able to fall asleep was by forcing himself to think about literally anything other than the decaying body parts dangling a couple feet (hah) above his head. He’d gotten quite good at it. Tonight, though, Rhys can’t decide if it’s worse to focus on his own thoughts, or focus on the soup-corpse pooling across the room. Neither are appealing. 

He tries, eventually, to focus on the feeling of the material of his hospital gown against his skin, and the soft caress of his own hair against the back of his neck, stirred by a vent somewhere overhead. 

How long had it been, since he had actually sat down and thought about the events of that night? Everything that had transpired not just after his tedious escape from the underbelly of Helios, but what had come before, too. How long had it been since he’d properly remembered it? 

Jack had known what he was doing, with that little jab about  _ tomorrow _ . He had to. He had to have known that everything would come flooding back, all those things that Rhys had tried so damn hard to repress. Every word spoken in hushed tones under the light of a purple moon, the warm flutter of involuntary but no less welcome touches, a promise of change in a relationship that was doomed from the start. 

He had to have known what he was doing, because the alternative would be that Jack had, after everything, forgotten Rhys as if he were little more than a footnote in the margins of a book he had no intention of finishing. 

_ Come home with me.  _

_ I can’t, Jack. Not tonight.  _

Something inside him snaps, and Rhys, too exhausted and in too much pain to care anymore, finally allows himself to  _ feel _ . 

And he does. 

He feels everything - the grief, the rage, the twisting, agonizing  _ hurt  _ of it all. All the emotions he’s kept bottled up inside come pouring out all at once. His anger at himself, for being cursed with this burden of heritage that he neither asked for nor deserved. Anger at Jack, at what could have been, and what still must inevitably come to pass. He cries for the loss of his arm, slams his remaining fist against the wall and curses the universe for being so cruel to him. And after all of that, after he cries and sobs and screams until his throat aches and his eyes are red and wet, Rhys finally,  _ finally,  _ slips away into the inviting embrace of sleep.

***

One of these days, Angel is sure she’s going to punch her father. 

He’d deserve it. He deserves a lot worse, actually, considering all the shit he pulls without consequence. How he manages to keep Hyperion afloat when he’s constantly tossing people trying to do their jobs out of an airlock will forever remain a mystery to Angel. His reckless, insensitive attitude of  _ me, me, me,  _ has shelled out enough death sentences to, ironically, last a lifetime. 

His one saving grace had, for a time, been Rhys, the quirky guy Meg had hired as Jack’s Personal Advisor. He’d been just as stubborn, just as smart, and a little more organized than his boss. Plus, while not entirely opposed to bloodshed, he’d at least had standards when it came to murdering employees. Usually the unlucky SOBs who were deemed unfit for living by Rhys had committed some grievous error. 

In the year or so that saw Rhys working at her father’s side, Angel had seen cracks start to appear in the oh-so-carefully constructed mask of masculinity and bloodlust Jack liked to hide himself behind. Sometimes, she could even see aspects of his old self peeking through. The version she wouldn’t have hesitated in calling  _ dad,  _ and certainly would never have called  _ Jack.  _ The man who, when Angel was a child, would tell bad dad jokes and take them on family roadtrips, who laughed kindly and sang loudly and always believed in the best of people. Somehow Rhys had found ways to coax that side of him out, and in those few and far between moments, Angel had found hope that one day, she’d have her dad back. 

Then Rhys had up and betrayed him, and Jack had gone from annoying to downright insufferable. 

Now here he was, refusing to talk about anything that had happened as if he were a petulant child, and Angel is certain that the next time she sees him in person, she’s going to punch him in the face. 

Here’s the thing. 

She’d wanted to hate Rhys. She really had. It was, after all, technically his fault that the progress in getting her dad back from his delusions of grandeur had regressed to the point of nonexistence, and he should be held accountable for that. Jack may have been - and still is - a difficult man to call “dad”, but he’s family, and if Angel has learned anything it’s that family matters, at least to her, more than anything else. 

Ever since Jack rose to power and Angel had taken control of the Core, her job had been simple. Gather information, keep an eye on things, report back to Jack if anything stood out. It had all been very generic. Never particularly boring, because Pandora provided endless entertainment, even if the residents didn’t know they were being watched, but repetitive. Things kicked up a bit when the siege broke out, what with the new Vault Hunters and the constant fighting and similarly constant death, although with time that, too, settled into a lull. 

Then came the betrayal, and Angel’s new assignment along with it. Instead of watching everything, she had to watch Rhys. Rhys, who at heart was just another sheltered business rat, despite his best efforts. Rhys, who was kind when he needed to be and cold when the situation called for it. Rhys, who charged into everything one hundred percent, all the time, even if he didn’t need to. It didn’t take long for Angel to understand why her father had taken a shine to him in the first place. On some level she wonders if it was for a similar reason that she herself overcame that initial hatred of Rhys - because he reminded her, in some odd way, of the man she remembers from her childhood. 

She still isn’t sure when it was that she started referring to Rhys as a friend. What had started as a tense, awkward work relationship had blossomed into a…well, she doesn’t really know how to describe what she has with Rhys. He makes her laugh, and she makes him laugh, and she’s pretty sure that makes them friends. Even if their entire relationship was built on a lie. As far as he knows, Angel is the exceedingly advanced Artificial Intelligence system that controls all of Helios at the behest of Handsome Jack, although at some point she rebelled against him to fight with the Raiders. The truth is a little more complicated than that, and now, with only days remaining until he unavoidably finds out Angel’s true identity, she’s found herself wondering what might have happened if the kid she had fed Rhys  _ had  _ been the truth. 

Realistically, Jack probably would have rebooted her systems and that would have been that. But a girl can dream. 

Once again, Angel finds her thoughts drifting back to Vaughn and Rhys, and the friendship they shared. Records indicated they had been best friends since the ripe old age of nine, somehow managing to withstand the test of time and also awkward teenage years. They’ve been her primary reference for the definition of “friendship”; a sort of blueprint, if you will. Any scenario Angel has dreamt up in which one of them betrays the other always, without fail, ends in tears and forgiveness. She finds it hard to believe they could ever stay mad at each other, which just begs the question of whether her own friendship with Rhys is strong enough to withstand the impending reveal of her true identity. Unfortunately, each scenario she’s run regarding  _ that  _ relationship never ends well. 

Truthfully, Angel isn’t quite sure what she’s going to do once she loses Rhys. 

Her job, she figures, because that’s what she’s always done. And it’s what she’ll always do. She’ll carry on with her spying and monitoring and deceit, pretending all the while that she isn’t grieving the loss of the one person she actually befriended of her own accord. Angel wasn’t lying when she’d told her dad she’s got exactly three friends, him included. The fact that she considers her own father her friend is frankly pretty telling of her life, if she’s honest. And Birdie, well, she’s sweet and in all fairness really  _ is  _ Angel’s best friend, it’s just that she’s...Birdie. Birdie, who would much rather shoot someone than talk to them. 

Angel hasn’t even lost him yet and thinking about Rhys hurts too much to bear. 

She tries not to think about what Vaughn must be going through right now. 

***

Grief didn’t tend to linger very long in Sanctuary. 

A few months back, one of the Crimson Raiders, a general, had been killed in a skirmish with Hyperion soldiers. He’d been a good man, brave, willing to fight til his last. His death came as a heavy blow, and yes, Sanctuary mourned. For one whole day, the city was silent. The bar played no music. Any conversations held in the town's common areas were hushed, if held at all. Even the  _ This Just In!  _ vendor ceased his typical pitch for the duration of the fallen soldier’s vigil. 

Now, Fiona can’t even remember his name. 

That’s how things worked, on this side of the rebellion. People died every day and sometimes, they weren’t mourned as they perhaps should have been. Everything moved so quickly and if they were to hold a wake for every soldier, spy, and agent who didn’t make it back from their mission, there would be no time to fight this war. 

Rhys was lucky. He’d been the secret star of the Crimson Raiders. Lilith had seen him as a sort of apprentice. The other Vault Hunters saw him as their equal. Of the four of them, Fiona had to admit he probably deserved it the most, even if sometimes she could get a little jealous. When news of his death had reached Sanctuary, the shock and grief lasted for a little over two weeks after his funeral. It gradually vanished as the people of Sanctuary busied themselves with work and the whole “Not dying” thing, but Fiona can be grateful that her friend got a proper send off. 

Even still, two weeks later, she’s still feeling the loss almost as fresh as it had been the first day. 

Losing people was something Fiona was well acquainted with. Her parents, when she was a child. Felix, shortly before Rhys and Vaughn had blown into her life. Countless other allies and friends who had been stomped out by Pandora’s cruel boot before their time. This time, though…this time things are different. This time she has to wake up every morning to the dead stares of her sister and their best friend. The empty bed, with its sheets still turned down from the night of the funeral, when Sasha and Vaughn and Fiona herself had climbed into the skinny box bed together and cried, sits in its corner of the room like a shadow, looming over everything. Rhys’ things have been neatly stacked and folded and put away in the steamer trunk at the foot of his bed, courtesy of Sasha in an attempt to distract herself. She’d thought it might help, not seeing Rhys’ junk lying around the bedroom, and it did, for about a day. And then Fiona realized she’d never get to fling Rhys’ stupid socks at him again, and Vaughn realized his best friend would never leave his shoes on top of their weapons duffel no matter how many times he’d complain about it, and Sasha would never get to snatch Rhys’ sketchbook from his grasp and taunt him about his sketches of Zer0 and the other Vault Hunters. It was all so…empty. 

Fiona hates it. 

She hates it even more because it’s hurting her family, and nobody -  _ nobody  _ \- is allowed to do that. If Rhys were to miraculously turn up out of the blue, alive and well, Fiona might just break his kneecaps. Right after hugging him tight enough to crack a rib or two. 

What makes this all the more difficult to bear is how Vaughn’s been handling it. 

In all the years that the four had been together, Fiona still hasn’t met a pair more inseparable than Rhys and Vaughn. Their synchronization was scary good - when one ran out of ammo, the other would already be offering a spare mag before any words had even been exchanged. Fiona supposed that sort of coordination came hand in hand with over a decade of friendship, but seeing it in action was still something else. She recalls asking, once, in their first year on the road - and this question came in a hushed voice, due in part to Sasha’s raging crush on Rhys she thought no one knew about -, if they were  _ you know, together,  _ to which she’d gotten some confused laughs and a “No, why?” from them both. The answer became clear, eventually, and it was simple. Really simple, actually. They trusted one another, indefinitely. A sort of trust that couldn’t be broken, no matter how fucked up circumstances got. 

  
  


Vaughn’s packing a bag when Fiona returns from her shower. 

He’s gotten good at this, over the years, learning how to pack efficiently for trips of indeterminate length. His fingers dance expertly over the surfaces of his guns, checking each one for defects or damage that could impede him in combat. Rejects get returned to the chest at the foot of his bed, open and waiting. In total, four get stowed in the digistruct holster at his side. When he’s done with the weapons he moves on to a couple shields, fiddling with the settings and cross-referencing stats until, like the guns, he picks a couple and sets aside the rest. He does all of this without acknowledging Fiona, or even pausing to think. It’s automatic, almost robotic, and so remarkably not Vaughn that quite frankly, it’s a little unsettling. 

“Hey,” Fiona says, hoping to at least garner a bit of a reaction, “Going somewhere?” 

Vaughn finally does pause, for a second, glancing up at her with a flicker of confusion that quickly turns into indifference. “Patrol,” he grunts, and resumes his meticulous packing job, this time picking up a medkit and skimming through its contents. Fiona skirts around the assorted piles of gear spread across the floor, trying to get over to her own bed. “Oh,” she says. “Give me a second to get dressed, I’ll-“

“No,” Vaughn snaps, before she can finish her thought. He looks guilty as soon as the word leaves his mouth. “Sorry, no, I just…I’d like to be alone. For now. Solo patrol and all that.” 

_ Okay,  _ Fiona thinks,  _ we’re doing this.  _ “I don’t want to be that person,” she says, as casually as she can manage while trying to fasten a bra under the poorly-secured towel she’s wrapped around herself for privacy, “But Vaughn, seriously. This isn’t healthy.”

Vaughn laughs, sort of. There isn’t really any humour behind it, and whether or not he meant for it to sound apathetic isn’t clear. “What, getting some exercise outside of the city? Geez, Fi, it’s nothing I haven’t done before.”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it,” Fiona counters, her turn to grow irritable now. “You’re shutting me out, Vaughn, both me and Sasha. I know everything sucks right now, okay? Everything really, really sucks, and I’m sorry about-“

“ _ What,  _ Fiona? You’re sorry about  _ what? _ ” 

The malice in Vaughn’s voice catches Fiona off guard, quickly putting an end to any train of thought she’d been following. Probably for the better, she admits, because the murderous glare in Vaughn’s eyes right now might have turned into full-blown murder if she’d kept going. 

Vaughn abandons his packing job to direct his full attention to the still-not-fully-dressed Fiona. The serious direction this conversation is headed makes her wonder whether it would be possible to discreetly pull on a pair of pants so she’s not awkwardly standing here in a shirt and underwear and nothing else. 

“You’re sorry for  _ what, _ Fiona?” Vaughn asks again, dangerously quiet, after a substantial chunk of time has passed in silence. “Sorry for Rhys? Sorry that  _ my best friend  _ got fucking  _ murdered _ ? Hey, question, whose idea was it to stay in Sanctuary again? ‘Cuz it wasn’t mine, that’s for damn-“

“Don’t you _dare_ pin this on me,” Fiona spits, inwardly shocked at how easily anger overcomes her. “Staying was _not_ just my decision. We all had a part to play in that. Even Rhys! God, _especially_ Rhys! You think Lilith would have even _let_ him leave after the shit he pulled during the attack? He knew the risks, and he _still_ outed himself to get us in the air. That’s always been his thing, that stupid, self-sacrificial, for-the-greater-good ideology. All he’s ever wanted was to help people, and I would have thought you of all people would know that, seeing as you two were apparently such good friends!” 

_ Snap.  _

A beat passes where neither of them say a thing. The tension is almost palpable. Vaughn stares at Fiona, face gone hard with barely controlled rage. In his hand he clutches the source of the noise - a broken med hypo, contents dripping thick and pink down his arm and onto the mattress. Small beads of blood well from the cuts scored deep into his skin, burning bright red against an already violent argument. 

“Oh, god,” Fiona finally manages. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean- that’s not what I-“

“Save it,” Vaughn replies tersely, voice clipped. “Just- save it, Fiona.” He opens his hand with a half-assed shake, letting the shards of shattered glass tumble from his palm and onto the puddle of dark pink slowly soaking into his blanket. “I’ll be back later. Maybe. Don’t wait up.” 

Fiona finds herself rooted to the spot, unable to do anything but watch in abject horror as Vaughn gathers up the last of his things and storms out of the bedroom. When he’s gone, and Fiona is alone, only then does she react, dropping to her knees like her legs have suddenly forgotten how to hold her weight, and only then does she allow herself to cry. 

She’s not sure how long she stays like that. Long enough that when a very sudden, very loud buzzing erupts from across the room, she jumps, having grown accustomed to the silence. Something on Vaughn’s bed lights up, left behind in the ruckus. Slowly, Fiona rises, and makes her way over to investigate. A flicker of confusion goes through her at first, upon finding herself looking at Vaughn’s ECHOtablet, sitting amongst a small pile of other objects that didn’t make it into Vaughn’s digistruct module. That confusion very quickly turns to despair, because if Vaughn doesn’t have his tablet, then how will they know he’s alright, and how- 

The thought dies before it can spiral. 

Fiona has lifted the tablet up, and although usually she wouldn’t invade her friend’s privacy like this, has clicked on the incoming message to open it. 

Her blood freezes in her veins.

**_(1) New Message_ **

**_From:_** _Rhys_

**_Message Reads:_ **

_ im ok. had a close call but am safe. cant talk long but needed u 2 kno im alive.  _

_ \- R.S.  _

***

Angel worries her lip between her teeth. If her father knew what she was doing, what she’s  _ done _ , she’s not sure even being his daughter could save her from his wrath. 

The tablet sits innocuously on her desk, cursor still blinking away in the little chat box. 

She’d sent for it the moment Rhys’ belongings had been cleared by Security. Strategically speaking, having Rhys’ ECHOdevice opened up a whole new array of possibilities for both sabotage and the gathering of intel. Which she’ll no doubt take advantage of, once she’s certain her little message has been received. 

Look, she knows it’s dirty. And it would have been smarter to just leave it alone, because if the whole resistance thinks Rhys is dead, then they’re in the clear for Operation Siren 2.0 without the fear of the whole of Sanctuary launching a rescue op, and now her little stunt has probably just mucked everything up. And if things go sideways, Angel is more than willing to take the blame for it. 

It’s worth it, though, she decides, as the little  _ received  _ icon pops up under her message. So long as Vaughn knows Rhys is alive, then maybe, just maybe, she can spare him the pain of losing a friend.

**Author's Note:**

> In the aaaarms ooooof the angellllssss...
> 
> (Or should I say arm?)
> 
> Also was that a dig at how much I hate The Fridge? Maybe. Whatever. Y'all can't fault me that place is confusing as hell and it sucks


End file.
